The video below shows kinda beautiful face after kinda beautiful face, each with believable features and pretty good hair. Each face is meant to be a celebrity, just one no one has heard of or seen, because each face is the creation of artificial intelligence. In other words, AI is getting really good at making fake people.
The faces were generated by a GAN (generative adversarial network). As the Nvidia researchers who ran the system wrote in a new paper, the network first generates an image of a celebrity based on previously-input data of real celebrities, and then a discriminator, or critic, checks that the images are good. The generator then improves itself based on the critic's assessment—it's a learning network. And the results, while far from perfect—you can see weird flaws in the fake celebrities' faces, the images themselves are only 1,024 by 1,024 pixels, and look closely for generated faces that look very similar to real-life celebs—are about as close as anyone's gotten to a truly realistic, AI-created network, at least according to the researchers.
So why invest time into giving the world more celebrity faces? As the Verge notes, AI can be a boon to the creative industry, making things like video games and CGI all the more realistic. There's also the implications of misinformation and hoaxes, if people want to pass off AI tech as real. Everything's already fake these days, and adding computer generated faces to the mix won't clarify anything. But that's a problem for the future. For now, the researchers admit "there is a long way to true photorealism," and there are still wonky errors ruining these pixels. Which is probably for the best, because we already have enough Hemsworths running around as it is.
