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Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

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Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#22
post #3

I’ve seen this going around twitter and the video looks cool but I don’t really understand what’s going on. Can someone explain it in layman’s terms?

A neural network is fed hundreds of thousands of images of celebrity faces. From this it learns the typical characteristics of human faces, and can then be used to draw new faces with random combinations of those characteristics.

This work is interesting because it is the first one that has been this successful at high resolution, so the output images are large and detailed rather than postage stamp sized.

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#23
post #8

Holy crap that video. It makes me think of the scramble suit from A Scanner Darkly[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWne23FfKW8

Had the same thought! Imagine how much time they could have saved drawing it all!

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#24
post #13

Wonder how long until this is co-opted by the porn industry and what the law will have to say about it. Is it illegal to own a digital brain that can think up illegal porn?

Note to all: Please don't do this. Lots of missing kids out there and the agents working in this area don't need anymore distractions.

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#25

Interesting. In another 300-500 years, I am pretty sure we will start simulating sensory experience and ultimately the past. I am not sure if I am a toy simulation of the past from the future, right now.

> I am not sure if I am a toy simulation of the past from the future, right now.

Think about this: what is the only generation that lives in times when massive recording, storage and communication is possible, but was not yet influenced by AI? Ours. When AI will want to simulate a "natural" human society, it has only us as templates to train its humanGAN on. Even our past comments on reddit and Twitter have been used many times to train dialogue systems - we're being uploaded with each post we make.

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#26
The progress in this field is astonishing. It wasn't even a few years ago that the typical demonstration in a paper on GAN would have been an array of very small images. I recall often seeing numbers between 64x64 and 256x256. At the time, the argument was raised that the resolution can hardly be increased because it is our brain that tries to identify objects and faces in the photos to figure out what they are representing.

Then here we are, with indistinguishable 1024x1024 recreations and trippy latent space interpolations. I know not every researcher or entrepreneur has the resources of NVIDIA to train for this many days, but let's not forget, that part needs to occur only once. It makes me wonder about the day that a GAN manages to bankrupt stock photography services.

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#28
post #26

The progress in this field is astonishing. It wasn't even a few years ago that the typical demonstration in a paper on GAN would have been an array of very small images. I recall often seeing numbers between 64x64 and 256x256. At the time, the argument was raised that the resolution can hardly be increased because it is our brain that tries to identify objects and faces in the photos to figure out what they are repre…

> I know not every researcher or entrepreneur has the resources of NVIDIA to train for this many days, but let's not forget, that part needs to occur only once.

It's not like they trained this on a GPU farm. According to the paper [1], they "trained the network on a single NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU for 20 days".

[1] http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2017-10_...

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#29
Worth pointing out the main criticism of GANs, which is that right now researchers don't really have a way to tell if a GAN is just copying and pasting the training data or not (there is no "test set" unlike in supervised learning). And in fact an ideal GAN could just learn to output the training set. One example someone found in the generated images for this model: https://twitter.com/nalkalchbrenner/status/92401333254951321....

Re: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video]

#30
post #13

Wonder how long until this is co-opted by the porn industry and what the law will have to say about it. Is it illegal to own a digital brain that can think up illegal porn?

I would say that it probably is. If you trained a network using illegal data (e.g. cp images) then not only did you have to have that data once, which is of course illegal, but the data itself is at least partially encoded in the network weights which I think should make it illegal.
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