Portraits of no one

[Jack Dahlgren]

Researchers in my company have made it possible to create portraits of people who never existed. Try checking the following link. Refresh for another portrait of someone who doesn't exist. I wonder if I click enough it will eventually show someone who looks just like me.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

[BEZ]

Most of the images don't look real  ....I will never know if that is because you told me they are not?  interesting!

[golunvolo]

They don´t look that real but I find it fascinating nonetheless. I have spend sometime looking at those non-existing people.

[Jack Dahlgren]

Certainly photographers have a keen eye for the flaws in these images, but these are very early days...

[CS]

Researchers in my company have made it possible to create portraits of people who never existed. Try checking the following link. Refresh for another portrait of someone who doesn't exist. I wonder if I click enough it will eventually show someone who looks just like me.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

What do they claim the point of this is? Some would say that a falsehood is a lie, which would of course get everyone's back up.....

[Jack Dahlgren]

What do they claim the point of this is? Some would say that a falsehood is a lie, which would of course get everyone's back up.....

Building all the assets of a computer game is expensive and time consuming. If you can have AI create the characters like this it has a significant impact.
Of course, humans could always create similar artwork, so what is striking is NOT the art, but the fact that a machine did it. Kind of like cameras that autofocus.

[CS]

Building all the assets of a computer game is expensive and time consuming. If you can have AI create the characters like this it has a significant impact.
Of course, humans could always create similar artwork, so what is striking is NOT the art, but the fact that a machine did it. Kind of like cameras that autofocus.

Oh, I didn't understand that your company was building computer games, i thought their building efforts were all physical. My error.

[Akira]

So, these are purely CG's?  Amazing!

[Jack Dahlgren]

So, these are purely CG's?  Amazing!

Yes, but unlike tradition CG where humans create the model and then render it using a computer, the faces and features are the result of a machine learning what a face is by viewing many many photographs. Then two networks are pitted against each other. One generates faces and the other one tells it if it is good or not, essentially training that network to generate good faces.

It gets a bit more complicated than that, but if you are interested check out the paper on this technique.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf

[Bent Hjarbo]

Fascinating 

[Frank Fremerey]

Researchers in my company have made it possible to create portraits of people who never existed. Try checking the following link. Refresh for another portrait of someone who doesn't exist. I wonder if I click enough it will eventually show someone who looks just like me.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

morphing from a database of real preople? shows when a young woman wears the skin of an old woman on her neck/throat

[Frank Fremerey]

another point is that the algorithm does not know most young women do not have shaving marks and beard stubble...

[Jack Dahlgren]

morphing from a database of real preople? shows when a young woman wears the skin of an old woman on her neck/throat

It is a bit different from morphing. Under it is not necessarily an algorithm (which presumably is made of rules and processes developed by humans) but is a neural network which was set up by a human but which develops its own understanding of images and can generate them on its own.

As for the skin of an old woman on the neck and throat, I believe the images the network was fed were primarily celebrity photos in the public domain. There is no shortage of celebrities trying very hard to keep a young face on an old body, and the machine learned this as well. The stubble on a woman’s face may also be recognition that the lines between male and female beauty may be blurry to computers these days.

[Bill Mellen]

Thanks for sharing this Jack,

I find the process fascinating.  My only quibble is that almost every image I have seen it make are of a better than average looking person 

[Frank Fremerey]

Jack: You mean training the network with genetic alhorithm and in the end you evaluate what the machine does for the next generation breeding? I was reporting in Adrian Thompsons pioneering work in that field 20 years ago. Only that he used hardware networks not software. The alhorithm used the analogue nature of the digital hardware and was therefore bound to the physics of the individual incarnation of the chip...