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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Half a dozen articles on ML-based image manipulation on HN at once. Seems we're really entering into a golden age of AI-based real-world applications, at least in specific niches. Personally I'm really excited about the potential of this in design, art, movies, games and interactive storytelling. Hard to imagine what will be possible in 5-10 years from now, but I kind of expect RPG games with fully AI-generated aesthetics / graphics and stories, where only some core gameplay mechanics are still determined by the designers of the game. Really can't wait to see that.

The work described in the linked article is also extremely impressive and feels almost unreal, in any case.

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> AI-based real-world applications

I don't know; I feel the real-world applications are still missing and what we are now seeing are tech demos (impressive ones!) and gimmicks. I'm still waiting to see all this ML stuff to be used in a productive context.

Pixelmator Pro has a ML powered image resizer built in. I like that.

Also Retrobatch has a ML based image classifier, but I didn't try that yet.

Other than these, yet all these are impressive tech demos. We need them in production and preferably open source (model + training + process) versions.

I personally use ML stuff in a productive context almost every day. Topaz labs software for denoising and upscaling images, Star Xterminator and Starnet for astrophotography edits. Don’t know if this counts as productive but the tools I use to analyze my chess games are also all utilizing neural nets. So if you’re not seeing useful ML applications in your day to day life it could just be that the things they’re good at don’t align well with your job or hobbies just yet.

>but I kind of expect RPG games with fully AI-generated aesthetics / graphics and stories,

I think Dwarf Fortress has the story generation part. The aesthetics/graphics part not yet..

And I think its procedurally generated, but with complex and strange results.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2ztnkw/i_thi...

> I think Dwarf Fortress has the story generation part. The aesthetics/graphics part not yet..

I suspect Ultima Ratio Regum is a step up from DF even in terms of procgen world lore. I mean the creator (author?) of that game wrote their PhD thesis on the subject

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/games/ultima-ratio-regum/

I’ve been waiting for an AI that can fix the color on all the old color television footage from the 1960s, 1970s, etc.

News and sports, in particular.

I'm very interested in this.

It got some weird pushback, but Peter Jackson's film "They Shall Not Grow Old" really helped make it's subjects so much more real by cutting through the limitations of the old footage from the 1st World War. Being able to apply similar techniques more cheaply and quickly will bring a lot of old footage to life and make the past much more real for the viewer.

That has been possible for few years now using GANs https://towardsdatascience.com/colorize-black-and-white-phot...

Top matches for "AI color grading"

https://colourlab.ai/

https://www.color.io/match

https://fylm.ai/

I don’t think the pervasiveness of ML articles on HN are an indicator of anything except hype trends on certain subject matters. ML research in these spaces has been very high output for many years now.

As someone in the field of computer graphics , where there’s been considerable ML research over the past few years that are more reliably applicable to people’s lives , most of the exciting stuff doesn’t make it to the front page of HN even if it’s posted here.

There’s been lots of research in the past few years. The initial shiny stuff makes it on here, but it’s the follow up iterations that are highly catalyzing of change that don’t because public interest in those topics has waned in the interim.

Would be great if you could share your 3-5 most exciting developments that weren't discussed mich here.

My mind might have quite a bit of recency bias since I just wrapped siggraph a few weeks ago (without catching Covid!) so I’m a little scattershot. I might come back to this later to post more concrete lists but here’s what came to mind first.

I should add that my point is more that there’s not been a slow down in ML research, and the ebb and flow of interest on HN isn’t indicative of accelerated progress in the field. Simply of what things have captured the public mind.

Anyway on to the links…

Disney had a slew of papers out this year, the facial motion retargeting ones in particular are very interesting for use in production of films and “metaverse” characters

https://studios.disneyresearch.com/machine-learning/

Luma have had a lot of progress in their Nerf capture and on device representation which will likely have huge effects for e-commerce use cases among other things

https://captures.lumalabs.ai/unbounded

Nvidia released an ML based version of OpenVDB that will potentially improve effects in films, but could be huge for games

https://youtu.be/uAs8X5es1DE

There were also a ton of neural rendering papers at siggraph that I still need to separate in my head mentally since I saw them presented back to back, so I apologize for just sharing a dump

https://twitter.com/neural_fields/status/1555947856271446018...

Apple released some neural rendering content too that has a lot of implications for spatial product training

https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13751

You started with downvotes but showed up with the links. Neural VDB looks wild - I can see games going nuts with detailed, interactive volumetrics now, with such a tiny memory footprint.

And imagine that its graphic is being generated on EVERY NEW GAME START so there won't be ever same experiences :O

Also can't wait to see where all of this will be in a couple of years!

Most likely somewhere around the bottom of the trough of disappointment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Speaking of which, is there any good ML-based superresolution algorithm out there? I'm trying to print a poster but some of my figures are in low resoltion ...

Maybe.. exciting times are back

Or it's just a hype

> Seems we're really entering into a golden age of AI-based real-world applications...

I wouldn't call moving pixels on a screen "real-world". Are these technologies going one day to have a physical effect on our lives, like, in the real real-world? I very much doubt it.

> very much doubt it

It's week two, give it two decades.

Or come and build some!

Amazon in 2000 didnt knew it would become infra for the world with AWS

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