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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.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 03 2018, @10:17PM (4 children)
It should be possible to obtain public domain photographs of people like Hillary Clinton or Will Smith, and then use those to create 3D models or whatever is needed to fake them snorting coke.
Or, you use copyrighted material to obtain their likeness, but manipulate it enough so that the derivative work can't be linked to any particular copyrighted photograph (again, anybody can take a photo of Hillary Clinton in public and declare it a public domain work).
Are you sure that Nvidia hasn't asked for permission, licensed the photographs from some archive, or does not have a valid fair use exemption?
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(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday January 08 2018, @01:40PM (3 children)
Or, you find these people at any public event and take a photo of them yourselves!!!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:42AM (2 children)
I badly implied that by writing "obtain public domain photographs". If you take it yourself, you can do whatever you want with it including releasing it into the public domain.
I still think that if you collect enough 2D data to create your 3D virtual actor, it will be impossible to trace the origin of any copyright material used. I think the more relevant legal issue is "personality rights".
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(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday January 09 2018, @11:26AM (1 child)
Well, you don't need this tech to create an infringement on "personality rights" because, in the case of computer games, it's totally possible for a talented CG Artist to, from scratch, create a 3D image of a celebrity. It won't be perfect, but it might fool enough people into thinking that the person posed for motion capture, and thus endorsed the likeness. Then you just need someone capable of mimicking their voice to a sufficiently believable level.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:19PM
https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12777204/lindsay-lohan-grand-theft-auto-5-lawsuit-thrown-out [theverge.com]
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