Mysterious website uses AI to create realistic (or horrific) faces
What's the story
Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming into our lives in ways unimaginable. For most cases of AI use, the technology is being used to make our lives simpler. In other cases, mostly pertaining to research, AI researchers are trying all sorts of things. In one such example, researchers trained an AI to make realistic faces, and the results range from beautiful to grotesque. Here's more.
Website
The many faced AI?
You can view the results of the experiment yourself by heading to ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. When you open the mysterious page, you'll be greeted with an AI-generated image of a face. Each time you refresh the page, you'll find a different face. Some of these faces look deceptively real, while some others look horrific, with distorted features. But, how is the AI generating these faces?
Explanation
How the AI is creating the faces
While news of the mysterious page spread through Reddit, the person who claims to have created the site popped up on Hacker News to explain what was going on. The faces on the website are the results of the efforts of a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). In a GAN, two AI systems essentially compete against each other to create a realistic imitation of something, from caricatures to portraits.
Other uses
The AI can also be used on anime and artwork
In this particular case, the GAN that is creating the faces were built by a group of Intel researchers and was trained on people's faces. The results of their research was published on the preprint server ArXiv last week. While this website was trained on human faces, other users have employed the GAN to create anime faces, and artwork too.
Twitter Post
WATCH: Anime faces generated using the AI
The StyleGAN anime face interpolations are solid:
— gwern (@gwern) February 12, 2019
- https://t.co/JtzWaQ1rLT
- https://t.co/dl5AqXYqlc
- https://t.co/FaldMdAbyQ pic.twitter.com/7T7hoCDXMg
Twitter Post
WATCH: Artwork generated by the AI
The coarse knob of #StyleGAN really is mesmerizing. Esp. how it adds/replaces some features to match the artistic style (collars, hats..etc) pic.twitter.com/RpuIM2REMn
— Cyril Diagne (@kikko_fr) February 10, 2019