back to article An AI system has just created the most realistic looking photos ever

AI systems can now create images of humans that are so lifelike they look like photographs, except the people in them don’t really exist. See for yourself. Each picture below is an output produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a system made up of two different networks including a generator and a discriminator. …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They Are Among Us

    Was some of this article generated by an AI too? There are some grievous grammatical errors..

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: They Are Among Us

      Please do not complain. The article was meant to be read by AIs only. Development of language is a fast pace process in AI. No human involvement is required on the Internet. It is a place for computers by computers.

      Now, get out of my Internet.

    2. Daniel Hall

      Re: They Are Among Us

      There are ALWAYS errors in the Reg articles. It's just a fact of life!

  2. Frumious Bandersnatch

    this new CSS file

    needs bigger gutters.

  3. Lt.Kije

    Image search

    Hmm, I'm going to do a Google image search. Bet I find some matches.

  4. Teiwaz

    Nvidia did what?

    Well, Nvidia is also planning to publish its source code and datasets soon

    What with Cuda and Iray closed vs. Opencl and Prorender.

    I have to assume they either need more input or don't think it's a money maker.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nvidia did what?

      They are a hardware conpany: selling hardware is what they are interested in: the free (as in beer at least) software & datasets are just a way of bootstrapping hardware sales.

      1. MonkeyCee

        Re: Nvidia did what?

        "selling hardware is what they are interested in"

        In terms of the ML space, no. Renting, sure, but owning, ROFL. They aren't even clear where they draw the line, so there is no academic exemption, or hardware specific. If they don't like the code you're running on their card, then no CUDA for you.

        We're not allowed to teach our ML students how to do it on a nVidia GPU, since that might suddenly make my 300 euro gaming GPU suddenly require a 10k pa dev licence that the uni would be on the hook for. AMD is much more helpful, since there stuff seems like it's released by engineers, not lawyers.

        In terms of cost, assuming a card lasts two years, roughly 80% of the total cost it is licencing fees versus hardware. 5k card, 20k licence.

        For the machines which do have that fat nVidia tax paid for, it's generally not the most expensive piece of software on the box. Oddly enough, the companies that make that software give me "free" copies, because I'll be using it for academic purposes.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How long before all the world's pictures look like

    EverywhereGirl?

    Even the ones that, for whatever reason, shouldn't actually look like EverywhereGirl?

    1. FuzzyWuzzys

      Re: How long before all the world's pictures look like

      You've never looked at 500px photo galleries then? All the top images on 500px.com pretty much all look like they were photographed and processed by machines using some form of AI software, generic and bland. People have lost the art of injecting "soul" into art these days, sadly it's not even the pursuit of money it's worse. Nowadays it's simply the pursuit of social networking rankings, very sad.

  6. Tom Paine

    Unrealistic

    They all look happy, even the ones that aren't grinning inanely.

    If I live long enough to retire one project I've mused about for years will be photography - documentary portraits of commuter faces. Regret, despair, angst, miseries of all sorts -- there's a vast palette of them on the 17:44 back to suburbia.

    1. MotorcyclesFish

      Re: Unrealistic

      Shot in a grim, stark black-and-white documentary style, like those portraits of grizzled civilians in warzones?

    2. FuzzyWuzzys
      Thumb Up

      Re: Unrealistic

      Do it! I've been a hobbyist snapper for many, many years I love capturing people's expressions but I tend to lean to more candid street images. My daily commute to my day-job down one of tube lines has lead me to consider a similar project. Candid snaps of people's thousand-yard stares while they cling to the handrails on the tube trains that are taking them to yet another dreary day in the office. Sometimes I just spend the the journey studying people's expressions, they really do run the entire gamut of human emotion some days.

  7. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Those are some impressive results in any case

    It is incredible how credible those portraits are.

    Blizzard should look into setting up a game character portrait creator like that. That would be awesome.

    1. SoltanGris

      Re: Those are some impressive results in any case

      Yah, that would look great on their upcoming phone games.

      What, you no have phone?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Those are some impressive results in any case

      The video really looks like the early morphing demos (such as the 'Black or White' videos) - but that was time-consuming hand tweaking of real faces, this is all automatic.

      Good news for troll farms and political donors wanting to hide their identities behind a myriad of fakes.

  8. badger31

    So that's a few good examples

    I wonder how many shit results they generated. What's their hit to shit ratio, judged by humans not the discriminator?

  9. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

    Fool me once...

    That woman in the red has a weird top - a strap on her right (halterneck? racerback?) but a fully covered shoulder on her left. But your instinct is, "What weird top is she wearing?!" Not, "That a compute generated image..."

    I guess we're all going to have to learn.

  10. Martin-73 Silver badge

    Well that's not creepy at all.

    Move along, carbon unit. Nothing to see here

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Photofit?

    So they made an automated photofit + colour swap system?

    Yes, I know it's a little more complex than that, but in reality, we also don't know "how" a specific neural network is doing something (we cannot reverse engineer just yet).

    So in that case, it could literally just be doing a photofit and colour swap. XD

  12. poohbear

    S1m0ne should be here shortly.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/reference

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I know this in general is a very bad development, but at the same time, as a solo hobby game dev, being able to generate 5000 unique images of people to use in a 2d game could be very handy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Do it!

      Like this software already exists (Google have a ton of APIs/example codes), and you also have Unsplash for (at least for development) free content to add to the data set!

      If I was clever enough, I would have done it already. You would have automated location + character generation at least on the cheap and seemingly infinite replayable (think the current trend of dungeon crawler/rouge lite).

  14. cutterman

    Teeth

    The adults teeth don't change.

    Bloody clever otherwise

    Mac

  15. GrapeBunch

    Science is Mankind's almost-identical sibling

    As t gets large, so will the number of faces you can produce which both look enough like you to fool a human, but don't fool many an algorithm.

    This could actually be good news for weaklin humings. For a short while.

  16. Locky
    Terminator

    Pay attention

    The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy. But these are new, they look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot.

  17. David Lawrence

    I recognise one of them....

    ....I'm pretty sure I used to go out with her. I should have known - she was a bit limited vocabulary-wise but on the plus side she was compliant, although it did worry me when she said "Dave I'm afraid I can't allow you to do that". I got more suspicious when she told me to call her Alexa during sex.

  18. Flakk

    GAN Output? Nope. Gene Parmesan.

    "GENE!"

  19. Parsimonious Tankard
    Pint

    Subtle comment

    "so other people can have a crack at creating their own fake faces."

    Well said sir! One just has to look at twitter, to realise this is already happening.

    Oh hang on... "Faces".

    My bad.

  20. Sekhen

    It took me a second, but the teeth and nose doesn't align properly is a few versions.

    Uncanny Valley all over the place.

  21. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    IT MEANS THAT!

    It means that people might be able to do things like creating realistic looking profile pictures for fake accounts like bots on Twitter or Facebook.

    By Titania McGraw!!

    You mean there are people putting real images of their looks onto Shitter and Farcebook?

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