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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/my-dead-father-is-writing-me-notes-again/ [arstechnica.com]
[FOR THE EDITOR: Maybe too many breaks / etc ...]

Growing up, if I wanted to experiment with something technical, my dad made it happen. We shared dozens of tech adventures [vintagecomputing.com] together, but those adventures were cut short when he died of cancer in 2013. Thanks to a new AI image generator, it turns out that my dad and I still have one more adventure to go.

Recently, an anonymous AI hobbyist discovered that an image synthesis model called Flux [arstechnica.com] can reproduce someone's handwriting very accurately if specially trained to do so.
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I admit that copying someone’s handwriting so convincingly could bring dangers. I've been warning [arstechnica.com] for years about an upcoming era [fastcompany.com] where digital media creation and mimicry is completely and effortlessly fluid [arstechnica.com], but it's still wild to see something that feels like magic work for the first time.
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As a daily tech news writer, I keep an eye on the latest innovations in AI image generation. Late last month while browsing Reddit, I noticed a post from an AI imagery hobbyist who goes by the name "fofr [x.com]"—pronounced "Foffer," he told me, so let's call him that for convenience. Foffer announced that he had replicated J.R.R. Tolkien's handwriting [reddit.com] using scans found in archives online.
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Foffer's breakthrough was realizing that Flux can be customized using a special technique called "LoRA" (short for "low-rank adaptation [arxiv.org]") to imitate someone's handwriting in a very realistic way. LoRA is a modular method of fine-tuning Flux to teach it new concepts that weren't in its original training dataset—the initial set of pictures and illustrations its creator [blackforestlabs.ai] used to teach it how to synthesize images.
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"I don’t want to encourage people to copy other’s handwriting, especially signatures," Foffer told me in an interview the day he took the Tolkien model down. But said he would help me attempt to apply his technique to a less famous individual for an article, telling me how I could inexpensively train my own image synthesis model [replicate.com] on a cloud AI hosting site called Replicate. "I think you should try it. I think you'll be surprised how fun and easy it is," he said.
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My dad was an electronics engineer, and he had a distinctive way of writing in all-caps that was instantly recognizable to me throughout his life. Many older engineers tend to write in all caps [reddit.com], and one theory is that it's because they learned to draft technical schematics on paper where all-caps is the labeling convention. Architects do something similar [wiltshire-design.com] because uppercase is easy to read.
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since my dad had passed away, I did not fear that someone could use his writing style to imitate him in a deceptive or fraudulent way, so he became a natural candidate for handwriting cloning with Flux. I began the task of assembling a "dad's uppercase" dataset.
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using neural networks to model handwriting isn't new. In January 2023, we covered a web app [arstechnica.com] called Calligrapher.ai that can simulate dynamic handwriting styles (based on 2013 research [arxiv.org] from Alex Graves). A blog post from 2016 written by machine learning scientist Sam Greydanus details [github.io] another method of creating AI-generated handwriting, and there's a company called Handwrytten [fastcompany.com] that sells robots that write actual letters, with pen on paper, using simulated human handwriting for marketing purposes [washingtonpost.com].

What's new in this instance is that we're using Flux, a free open-weights AI model anyone can download or fine-tune, to absorb and reproduce handwriting styles.
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The process of teaching Flux to reproduce handwriting was surprisingly accessible. The technique is similar to a recently discovered method that allows people to insert custom typefaces [arstechnica.com] into AI-generated images. To train Flux, I used Ostri's "flux-dev-lora-trainer [replicate.com]" hosted on Replicate.com. It's a cloud process that costs around $2 to $4 per training. In other words, it can cost as little as $2 to clone a person's handwriting in the cloud. The training process can also take place locally on a PC using a consumer-level RTX 3090 GPU over several hours.
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I also downloaded the model and ran it on an RTX 3060 and later a 3090 using a quantized (simplified and size-reduced) version of Flux.1 dev [huggingface.co] (the full technical name of the model). It produced similar results, but they weren't quite as detailed due to the reduced complexity. As a result, I generated almost all of the images you see here on Replicate using the full Flux.1 dev AI model.
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I felt joy to see newly synthesized samples of Dad's handwriting again. They read to me like his written voice, and I can feel the warmth just seeing the letters. I know it's not real and he didn't really write it, so I personally find it fun.

After training the AI model, I enjoyed creating silly messages from my dad as if he were actually writing to me from beyond the grave. They're funny to me because he and I shared the same sense of humor. I discovered that Flux can render his handwriting in many different forms of media, including neon signs, tattoos, and even clouds in the sky.
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Even with the coherent generations shown throughout this article, the results are not always perfect. Sometimes Flux repeats or garbles words, and sometimes new words are confabulated into place. Long passages of text are particularly challenging.
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In the wider world, deceptive AI-powered voice cloning [arstechnica.com] and appearance cloning [arstechnica.com] are already causing legal trouble. So while the ability to re-create the handwriting of my beloved father presents interesting technical possibilities, the technique also raises important ethical questions. The technology's potential for misuse can't be ignored, particularly when it comes to replicating the handwriting of individuals without their consent.
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As someone on Reddit wrote [reddit.com] in response to the Tolkien handwriting clone, "You'd have to get a hold of multiple examples of their signature or handwriting. In which case it's almost always guaranteed that the culprit is someone close to you."
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It's worth emphasizing that in most legal jurisdictions, creating false documents or signatures for illegal gain (called forgery) is a crime [findlaw.com]. People have been forging handwriting [warwick.ac.uk] or signatures for literal millennia, long before the age of generative AI. According to a book on the history of forgeries [springer.com], the Roman Empire developed laws against document forgery as early as 80 BC. Like recent examples in the tech industry where people end up reinventing things [cracked.com] that already exist, certain people may also by tempted to treat potential crimes of AI-fueled deception as irrepressibly new.
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We already live in a world where truth and lies intermingle due to AI synthesis. I have called it the "cultural singularity [fastcompany.com]"—the point at which fact and fiction in media become indistinguishable. But while I love to act like I've discovered something new, maybe we already hit that point the first time someone forged a cuneiform tablet [researchgate.net] in ancient Babylon.
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I welcome you to download and use the "Dad's Uppercase" model yourself on either Replicate [replicate.com] or Civitai [civitai.com] with no restrictions of any kind, aside from those found in the Flux.1 dev license [huggingface.co], which I do not control. To activate the style with the best results, you'll need to use the keyword "d4dupp3r" in your prompts. You can even build off of it if you like. I feel that even though it's not scientifically true, it's philosophically true that as long as that model is around, part of my dad is still around as well.

Original Submission