(this article is first published in the fruit shell)

take a look at the following group of photos, can you find any mystery in it?

what these photos have in common is that they are all synthetic images made by AI, and the people in them have never really existed in this world. The images are from a website called "this person doesn't exist" (thispersondoesnotexist.com), and every time you click to refresh, a brand new synthetic portrait is displayed. When we look closely, we can still find some unnatural details in the photo (for example, the lady in the lower right corner, the junction between her hair and the background is very delicate), but the authenticity of these portraits is really amazing.

the AI behind these photos is called StyleGAN, which is from NVIDIA. This is a generating countermeasure network (Generative Adversarial Networks). In short, it consists of two artificial neural networks: one is responsible for generating a new composite image, while the other is based on the real image to learn and determine whether the composite result looks "true" or "false", and feedback the results to the picture generation model.

(synthetic portraits of different styles. Original video source: Tero Karras FI)

before that, people have been training to generate countermeasure networks for various image processing, and StyleGAN has improved the technology. It can not only get high-quality images that look more real, but also help people better control and understand the process of generating these images. In order to let the public know about this powerful technology, Phillip Wang, a software engineer, set up the website mentioned above. Now, there is no need to run the program yourself, as long as open the browser to swipe, anyone can enjoy these fake and real composite portraits.

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of course, StyleGAN is also capable of processing other types of images, such as constantly synthesizing non-existent cat photos:

(photo source: Tero Karras et al)

I think this may be the really popular feature.

Source:

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeepNetGroup/permalink/805364403189777/

https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-style-based-generator-architecture-for-generative-adversarial-networks/

https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan