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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 03 2018, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-girl-for-all-geeks dept.

How an A.I. 'Cat-and-Mouse Game' Generates Believable Fake Photos (archive)

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. But not exactly. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. And yet, you cannot quite place her. That's because she's not real. She was created by a machine.

The image is one of the faux celebrity photos generated by software under development at Nvidia, the big-name computer chip maker that is investing heavily in research involving artificial intelligence.

At a lab in Finland, a small team of Nvidia researchers recently built a system that can analyze thousands of (real) celebrity snapshots, recognize common patterns, and create new images that look much the same — but are still a little different. The system can also generate realistic images of horses, buses, bicycles, plants and many other common objects.

The project is part of a vast and varied effort to build technology that can automatically generate convincing images — or alter existing images in equally convincing ways. The hope is that this technology can significantly accelerate and improve the creation of computer interfaces, games, movies and other media, eventually allowing software to create realistic imagery in moments rather than the hours — if not days — it can now take human developers.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday January 03 2018, @10:02PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 03 2018, @10:02PM (#617378) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_actor [wikipedia.org]

    It has been used pretty extensively in the new Star Wars trilogy.

    Here are two fictional films about the concept (am I missing any?):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film) [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) [wikipedia.org]

    Hollywood estates will oppose the unpaid use of virtual versions of dead actors. Composite versions could sidestep that (blend two or more famous actors) and lead to a nice First Amendment case. Of course, you could always create something from scratch, like Hatsune Miku [soylentnews.org].

    Perhaps the bigger deal will be CGI sets. Sanctuary [wikipedia.org] is a TV show that extensively used green screens. With better/cheaper hardware and more automation on the animation/design side, even total AutoCAD noobs could create a realistic looking mansion in which they can insert their real (or virtual) actors.

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