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This person does not exist

thispersondoesnotexist.com

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Re: This person does not exist

#151

Post by kragen »

angrygoat wrote: post #42

Here’s the Guardian article which linked the site: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/feb/07/ai-in-the-ad... To my mind there is a massive need for us in the software world to pause and think about the ethics of all of this. Engineers more broadly have well developed ethical codes, we should too.

The Free Software Foundation has been promoting a well-developed ethical code for software engineering since the 1980s: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

Consider https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-root-of-this-problem.html and https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.html as recent entries.

It covers most of the widely debated issues in software today, including spam, malware, DRM, invasion of privacy, undue influence by one participant in the ecosystem, copyright infringement, and bait-and-switch terms of service. It even addresses the question of writing software that could be misused.

It isn't widely accepted because a lot of programmers don't like it. They don't like it because they make money by violating it.

Re: This person does not exist

#152

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

bumby wrote: post #150
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a big debate in the 90s. The "industry" headed it off at the gates (partly thanks to communication media such as ... usenet :) It might resurface, but I expect to hear the same arguments used against it, all over again. I'd be suprised if it ever came to pass in the same sense as PE requirements.

What were the main arguments back then?

Well, there were a couple that I remember.

1) programming is more like an art than a science, and so should not be regulated like engineering

2) the capital/labor requirements for programming are minimal - basically anyone could do it - so we should not worry about trying to license something that people could (and do) do at home.

3) there's no agreement about what would be required to get a license.

4) free software would die

Of course, some of these really do not hold up to close inspection. It's true that there is an "art" to programming, but not much more than there is in architecture for example, and there's no reason you couldn't require a license for cases where you do work for others rather than yourself. Since the 90s, it's become a _little_ more clear what the components of a s/w dev license might be, but perhaps still not enough to really pin it down. And yes, it would probably kill the free software world.

Re: This person does not exist

#154

Post by bumby »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #152
bumby wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the main arguments back then?

Well, there were a couple that I remember. 1) programming is more like an art than a science, and so should not be regulated like engineering 2) the capital/labor requirements for programming are minimal - basically anyone could do it - so we should not worry about trying to license something that people could (and do) do at home. 3) there's no agreement about what would be required to get a license. 4) free software…

I wonder if they could parallel other engineering disciplines and give exemptions for specific areas or other avenues to ease the burden.

For example, as long as a certain percentage of principal engineers are licensed, others within the company don’t have to be. Similar with working under a licensed lead or specific article industry exemptions.

It would also give some power to the developers over management in key decisions. I’ve seen managers try to back engineers into a corner and when the engineer ultimately said they wouldn’t sign off on a design, management backed down because they didn’t have an equivalent to “just ship it now” and get it stamped later.

I understand the fear of it, but sometimes it seems like the sw development is run like the Wild West.

Re: This person does not exist

#155

Post by boublepop »

Om my book “x doesn’t exist” demonstrations are absolutely worthless if they don’t as a minimum show at least one “closest” member of the training set.

You could set up a script that just randomly picked one out of 50 images of my closest family and no one would know the difference from going to it.

Re: This person does not exist

#157

Post by gwern »

jammygit wrote: post #145
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #70

It has been interesting to see images clearly generated by this service (same artefacts, same resolution) start to flood online dating apps and social media profiles. Previously, fake accounts tended to use photos which could be reverse-image-searched to detect them. Luckily, it doesn't seem that this approach can be sensibly extended to generate entire scenes, or multiple entire-body photos from different angles. Be…

What is the license for these images? I can imagine them being handy for fictional character portraits

Since they are generated randomly, there is no copyright. Machines cannot be authors: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#faq

Re: This person does not exist

#158

Post by gwern »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #123

What's the current state of the art on controllable GANs? Like if you wanted to build a thispersondoesnotexist but with the ability to control e.g. gender, smile, sunglasses, ethnicity?

I believe S1/S2 still are effectively SOTA for static face image editing. (Note that S2 added a projector and has better latent spaces than S1; see the paper.) You can play around with them at https://artbreeder.com/browse among other ways.

Re: This person does not exist

#159

Post by krapp »

kunle wrote: post #115
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #70

It has been interesting to see images clearly generated by this service (same artefacts, same resolution) start to flood online dating apps and social media profiles. Previously, fake accounts tended to use photos which could be reverse-image-searched to detect them. Luckily, it doesn't seem that this approach can be sensibly extended to generate entire scenes, or multiple entire-body photos from different angles. Be…

There's a couple of startups programmatically generating entire new scenes using only words as the input (target use cases are movies/animations/gaming). The output quality isn't yet as high as the OP site, but we're max 18 months out from something like www.thisplacedoesnotexist.com or something like that. Edit: one such startup is https://opus.ai/

Of course a killer app for this sort of thing would be customizable models for VR porn.

Re: This person does not exist

#160

Post by gwern »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #77

I noticed there are very few black people and none with very dark skin. But there are lots of people of many other ethnicities. Was dark skin avoided because it's inherently harder for the algorithm?

The original FFHQ was designed to cover a lot of ethnicities, but maybe it didn't cover very dark skin enough? Alternately, it might be related to the 'truncation trick': images at the 'edge' of the latent space get dropped to assure high quality at the cost of covering the entire distribution. If very black skin got mapped to a compact cluster at the edge, say, the truncation trick could hypothetically lead to few such samples despite representation. To test this you would generate images with very high psi to see if they come out more often.
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