Can you say if this person exists ?

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958

Can you say if this person exists ?

Hello all, as the advancements in technology proliferate, these advancement can sometimes be very incredible and sometimes be very inconceivable. One such advancement in the technology is the Fake Human Face generation, which generates human faces of those humans which never took birth, and are convincingly very real. This advancement reminds us that we as humans have a very peculiar relationship with technology and especially AI. We love to discuss about it and its benefits but at the same time fear/hate it.

Today, I am just going to give a glimpse of this technological advancement which reminds us that we are in an age of critical transformation between the worlds of machines and humans. As I know that many of you will be busy with your schedules for the day, hence I will just skim through the important details of advancement which you all should know.

The Creators:

This amazing research is done by Researchers at NVIDIA known as StyleGAN (research published in 2019) which stands for Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks. They have also made further progress by improving the quality of their generated images and named it StyleGAN2 (research published in 2020). They have also made the source code available to public for both of these researches which you can find here and here and have also released the accompanying software for this.

Look at some of the images below:

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948

Source: Images by StyleGAN

What do you think about these images? are they real or fake? The answer is that these are all fake images generated by the NVIDIA's StyleGAN. Don't you think that this is an incredible research work? 

The Website that generates Fake Human Faces:

Inspired from this research, in 2019, Uber engineer Phillip Wang used the software to create a website known as This Person Does not Exist (link) which displays a new face generated by the AI on every web page reload. After seeing the potential of StyleGAN, he himself was amazed as the fake human faces are so real that they are indistinguishable from a real human face.

Utilization of this technology:

Here a point be noted is that, this research work is not only for the generation of fake human faces but also for the generation of fake cars, bedrooms, cats, etc. which never existed in this universe. Example of such generated images can be seen below:

Fake bedrooms:

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948

Fake Cars:

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948

Fake Cats:

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948

Issues that can arise if utilized for criminal activities:

This technology can be compared with the Deep Fakes and can be potentially used for sinister purposes.

As, such cases where this technology was used to dodge the machine systems have come into limelight, one such was when Facebook took down many network of accounts with false identities and mentioned that many of them had used profile pictures created with Artificial Intelligence.

Conclusion:

Though this technology is not very old but we should know that it exists and be wary of it just like eventually people got wary about the existence of a technology where we can Photoshop an image by just using just a computer.

By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it. 

- Eliezer Yudkowsky

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That's all for today, Hope you all liked it. If you liked it please tell in the comments your thoughts and you can rate this post according to the options given below at the end of this post.