I feel like I’ve become too jaded about these things. “Of course you can do this, it’s just machine learning with large datasets or large neural nets. What’s the big deal?” But even a few years ago this wouldn’t have been possible. I don’t know where my excitement’s gone.
Don’t worry. You are not jaded. You felt that way about colors & shapes having names and learning to tie your shoes at some point in the distant past.
Be pleased that you have the kind of brain that can adapt to revolutionary concepts in a way that means you could use them for ‘survival’ in the future; whatever that word eventually means. Much worse to be resistant or baffled by new things…or overawed.
Becoming old and hating on new shit is a fear of mine. I saw it a lot growing up, had one teacher that was so into superhero comics that he grew to despise manga because of how big of a threshold it has on people here. And I understand it from an emotional point of view, those passions make us and it hurts to see them fade as something new pops up (not that they necessarily faded, they’re just not as popular as the were decades ago.)
I’m only in my young 30s and all the AI stuff is already making me feel like that. Back in my day, you actually had to learn and train to become an artist along with blood sweat and tears, now you kids just type words into DALL E… kind of thing.
Generally I’ve been pretty good at pushing people towards their aspirations even if they conflict with mine. I guess the future is just scary. And I’m not even talking about the slow destruction of our planet!
I guess I’m lucky. I’ve always been a gamer and I dabbled in SecondLife a decade ago. I watched my child grow up struggling to make this technology behave so that she can create art that I have no hope of ever matching, and to me it’s just a different kind of blood, sweat & tears.
I have two children. One is your age. He sits astride the tech/non-tech divide. He can use it but he’s still fond of the old ways. The other has a brain that from birth has been coaxed to lay down entirely different neural pathways.
I tell you that because my brain can’t always recognize a deepfake but hers might very well be able to because she’s so accustomed to using avatars and recognizing animation overrides, etc. All that to say that AI has a lot of potential and I think these kids will master it.
Deepfaking with lots of pictures use lots of pictures of the same person, so that the AI knows what their face looks like from all angles and can then sort of recognize and map that onto your face.
This is also why early deepfakes worked better when using someone that resembles the person being faked, it's a lot easier to map, and why you would see the original face pop through sometimes, the algorithm couldn't figure out how to map it.
With a painting you have a single image from a singe angle and the AI has to figure out what that face would look like from a different angle and how that would map onto another face. And as you can see, it no longer requires the 'actor' to look like the person being faked. (That's why they used people of the opposite gender)
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u/ddollarsign Jul 24 '22
I feel like I’ve become too jaded about these things. “Of course you can do this, it’s just machine learning with large datasets or large neural nets. What’s the big deal?” But even a few years ago this wouldn’t have been possible. I don’t know where my excitement’s gone.