Who sAId robots couldn’t be creative? artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer the stuff of science fiction films, and now this technology is tapping into the art world. In a new paper published by NVIDIA researchers, they released photographic portraits completely generated by AI (GAN) but with a twist – none of the people in the images actually exist.
Image credits: Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Timo Aila
According to The Verge GAN was introduced in 2014. The portraits at the time were semi life-like, grainy and in black and white. Jump forward to the portrait photography simulation today, and the resemblance to a real person is so accurate that most people can’t tell the difference.
The current researchers were able to use their AI to copy the ‘styles’ of various face sources then create blends of these originals to develop completely new “people.” It took eight weeks for the researchers to train the AI, using powerful GPUs.
Faces generated by “A Style-Based Generator Architecture for GANs.”
But the artificial intelligence future promises more than these faces, in 2014 75% of IKEA’s catalogue photos were computer generated. Just like with any technological advance, there could be a negative repercussion. With the ability to create faces, furniture, cars, and real estate it calls into question the future for stock photographers and where their place will be in this new digitized world, following this artificial intelligence example.
“These datasets were trained using the setup for the duration of 70M images for ‘bedroom’ and ‘cats,’ and 46M for ‘cars'”
Watch how AI has progressed in this 6- minute video
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