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There is now a trend of all sorts of AI-generated things that do not exist in real life. Although Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a technique from deep learning developed by I. Goodfellow, has been around for the past couple of years, the media and social networks started picking up on the trend only after http://thispersondoesnotexist.com came online by Philip Wang, a 33 years old Software Engineer . This person does not exist uses GANs, specifically styleGANs by T. Karras, to generate thousands of portraits of people that have never existed in real life.
After AI-generated people made news, AI-generated cats followed with a dedicated website showcasing infinitely generated fake cats https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com/. Unlike generated people, many cats were deformed but still very cat-ish, and that is probably due to the huge diversity in the cat’s training dataset.
The everly so ambitious AI did not stop at generating people and cats. AI-generated resumes are now a thing to watch for https://thisresumedoesnotexist.com and read with an open mind.
After AI-generated people, cats and resumes, what is next?
By the end of 2016, with GANs not being as optimized and GPUs not being as performant as they are today, one of the first people to not have existed have been generated to be part of an artwork in 2017 that was exhibited and sold in the Grand Palais of Feb 2018 and another one that won a digital art award at the Salon d’Automne and was re-exhibited at the Grand Palais in 2019 as detailed on the artist’s page www.alagraphy.com . This was way before the rise of AI ART and the buzz lead by Christie’s.
One of the first tribes of the “Children of the Cloud” has invited huge amounts of philosophical debates and comments, despite the low resolution of the images. The generated faces were trained on a database of portraits taken by the artist for the www.1001face.org project.
What is remarkable is that the generated faces do not resemble any of the faces that were selected for the training set.
This leads us to a series of questions to muse on:
Can we call AI creative? Can we call AI a creator independent from the artist or the coder in this case?
EDIT: More recently, these inanimate AI-generated fictional characters were given life thanks to a collaboration with my heritage. Exciting yet creepy at the same time.
After AI-generated portraits, cats, and resumes, what is next to be generated from scratch? Apparently, https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com/ is the most recent artificially generated page about rental listings like AirBnB.
Is this legal, safe, and what consequences might sprout of it? An interesting question was raised via https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/03/why-thispersondoesnotexist-and-its-copycats-need-to-be-restricted/ and is being discussed at Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/awy3tx/why_thispersondoesnotexist_and_its_copycats_need/
When will we witness AI-generated medium articles or peer-reviewed scientific articles if we have not already?
What is next on the AI todo-list?
I will leave you here!
Goodbye!
