An interesting web site - AI generated, photorealistic human portraits. Refresh the page to get a new image.
Article here.
Wow. That’s deep — really. Brings up all sorts of inchoate thoughts about identity and human individuality.
2200 more and James Cameron can start work on “Titanic II.”
ETA: My mistake, there might already be that many, if not more.
Seems that there are varying values for “photorealistic”. The first one I saw was grotesque and make me think - Virtual Mr. Potato Head!
I can’t put my finger on why, but there seems to be a lot of androgyny going on there. Many of the photos seemed to be amalgams of male and female facial parts, and except for cues like long hair and jewelry (for women) and short hair and facial hair follicles (for men) I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
There’s a photo of me on there! :eek:
I thought that was you.
Jorge Luis Borges would have liked that post. And the site itself — a sort of Library of Babel of individuals (rather than books), where you “wander” desperately, pointlessly, hopelessly trying to find that someone you recognize, or that someone you love.
The first picture I saw I would have sworn was Michelle Obama. I had to open another tab and image search for a picture of her in order to realize it wasn’t. I refreshed the page and there was a picture of some famous child actor, or so I thought.
Tibby, or not Tibby?
The same system can generate other things, such as cats.
The skin texture looks odd on most of them, especially in the forehead area
The intersection of hair and glasses is sometimes a trainwreck.
I find the misses more interesting than the hits. A lot of them seem to have a funhouse-mirror distorted image of the same face splattered against the edge of the picture. Shoulders and torso are sometimes scrambled, or absent. And one I saw had a pair of glasses propped up on top of her head, except that they were distorted in ways that glasses never would be.
AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH :eek::eek::eek::eek:
It’s interesting, because I’ve been doing 3D images for a time, and I see that I now notice a lot of things that would have escaped me before.
Anyway, that’s an amusing link, but, whatever could be the method they use to generate portraits (they seem to be composite), most pictures have significant flaws, and a number have terrible flaws (like an eyebrow on the forehead, a bit of beard on one side of a “female” face, a significantly deformed chin, etc…) The most realistic tend to be those of young people, because of course a smooth skin is easier to imitate than an older one.
Of course, there are tons of pictures out there that are more realistic than this, the originality here being the generation of so many different faces.
I chose a random photo from that site and added a little animation … strictly in the interest of science, of course.
I may be spending a bit less time on the SDMB for a while.
It seems like in some pictures the AI sort of peppers in stuff like wrinkles or skin blemishes in a weird way. Also I guess AI doesn’t know about braces or tooth whitening because none of the people have straight teeth or bright white teeth they all seemed stain but in the same generic way, also all the people seem to have a midline discrepancy sort of like Tom Cruise, weird.
There definitely were some faces though that looked extremely realistic.
Is there a page that explains how it’s making the images?
There was one of a woman wearing glasses. The image even had the distortion behind the lenses, where the eyes are squished in, the way they are when you wear thick glasses for nearsightedness. That was a nice touch.
Here’s the link. You can also download the software. It is done with a neural-network architecture they describe as a “style-based generator”, which incorporates an intermediate “style” layer they can use to more easily get at features such as hairstyle, pose, face shape, eyeglasses, coloring, lighting, etc. Like other neural networks, it is initially trained on a sample set of images.