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By now you're probably already aware of https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
It is a website that uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate photos of people who do not exist. This story was sourced from https://www.inverse.com/article/53280-this-person-does-not-exist-gans-website
The article goes into some depth on how the researchers achieved this. But deepfakes of this nature present a problem. There are the obvious "safety concerns" for users of dating websites but these fakes are good enough to get on linkedin as well and perhaps fool an employer or other unaware person.
Fortunately, AI of any stripe, including GANs are not and never will be perfect and on this soylent exclusive, I wanted to take a moment to ring the alarm bells and explain how you can detect fakes like this.
AIs are not magical. They are merely complex heuristic and statistical systems, built and trained for a specific purpose. As such, they are only as good as their training data.
Obviously, the researchers had to source a training set from somewhere and it is clear that they used Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram.
As such, these photos, even the high quality ones all contain mistakes that AI would make (statistical mistakes), that a real human would not have and these mistakes are all tells.
Go ahead and go to the website, let it generate a photo. 8 out of 10 look perfect at first glance. I even found a few that looked like me and family members.
But remember people are describing these as "eerie"? Well there's a reason these look eerie, even the best ones.
That reason is from a statistical mistake in the eyes, specifically the pupils. Every one of these photos has at least two problems.
#1 is that the pupils are never dilated the same. In a normal healthy human the pupils dilate to the same extent, always. The only time they don't is when there is a brain injury such as acute head trauma or stroke. Since none of these people appear to be in a medical context where we might expect blown pupils, they appear creepy, deranged, crazy, brain injured etc.
#2 is that normal humans have no red in their irises. This appears to be a statistical mistake. Normal amateur photographers will frequently capture a concept called "red eye" where the flash of the camera reflects off the retina producing a red glow that we are all familiar with. The training set for this AI appears to have had a large number of red-eye photos in it and as a result there is red in the eye. But the red is not inside the pupils, it gets painted onto the irises. As a result, everyone appears to have toxic heavy metal poisoning (the usual cause of red splotches in the iris), in addition to traumatic brain injury.
There is also a third problem that is present in about 40% of the images. That mistake has to do with the hair. The way the hair is generated especially on men produces a "doll hair" effect, where hundreds maybe thousands of strands all pop up from clumps, in the same way it does on a doll. Unless the person has recently had hair transplant surgery, this is just not a thing that happens in real life.
So now you know. You'll be able to pick out the very best fakes this AI has to offer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @04:08PM (4 children)
I realize the spirit of Soylent and its predecessor site Chips & Dips, has always been to try to present an unbiased overview of news and spark debate.
We usually do that with paragraphs at a time taken directly from the articles, but we started with rants and editorializing.
I have been thinking that with the new EU link tax, sites like Soylent will have to evolve towards our roots.
This article is a form of editorializing and a thinly disguised rant about the uncanny valley.
True it was a fact based opinion piece, and it linked to the original content, but what snips there were, were shortened to fit within the intentions of the EU directive. In retrospect I should have also linked to the arxiv pre-print, because the collective IQ here is high enough to grok it. https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948 [arxiv.org]
These are truly exciting times to be in a tech world, but sites like Soylent are going to be hard hit under the new EU link tax if we don't change the way we do things and generate our own news, meta, editorial, or just the facts please.
AC for life.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Friday February 15 2019, @05:40PM (1 child)
I suspect this article was written by UID2645 [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:43PM
Nope it's not.
Signed OP AC.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @07:49PM (1 child)
Are we going to be hit hard by the EU? I suspect we will persevere.
The future of sites like these is going to be on decentralized platforms anyway. Soylent may have to die before it can be truly born.
As for your content, I appreciate it. It would probably take a lot of effort to write up every single piece that hits the front page, unless we kept things very basic and matter-of-fact. I typically only do a long writeup for topics I really care about.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @10:38PM
Thanks! I don't might doing custom writeups on the content I submit. But I'd be able to do max one a day because I have a fulltime day job.
It's interesting you mention that the future of sites like Soylent is decentralized.
I've been working on a project to create a site like Soylent on its own custom blockchain which of course is nothing more than a distributed database with cryptographic guarantees. I watched steemit rise and fall, and have some ideas about how a news site like Soylent or Medium could become self funding and sustainable using a karma based moderation system.
Perhaps I'll do a write up on it.