[HN Gopher] MegaPortraits: One-Shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars ___________________________________________________________________ MegaPortraits: One-Shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars Author : voydik Score : 156 points Date : 2022-07-20 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (samsunglabs.github.io) (TXT) w3m dump (samsunglabs.github.io) | daenz wrote: | I love the technology behind this stuff but the number of | applications with negative social benefit seem to outweigh the | rest. | zamalek wrote: | > the rest. | | It's often missed that "the rest" includes plausible | deniability. As states become ever more infatuated with | surveillance, this is going to become extremely important. | mrwh wrote: | I'm inclined to agree. So clever, and yet what's the actual | good of it? Feels like there's a crisis in our industry | (talking of the wider software engineering world) of finding | real, human problems to solve. And so we end up with this, so | highly advanced and yet it's not going to improve any lives | (and possibly very much the reverse). | belter wrote: | I can see famous actors licensing their image, with multiple | shadow actors doing their moves. Now you can make 50 movies per | year instead of 5. You heard it here first... | ceeplusplus wrote: | The shadow actor still needs to deliver a convincing | performance though (=$$$). AI can't magically make bad acting | turn into good acting. | kibibu wrote: | Why not create an AI model that improves acting? | towaway15463 wrote: | Acting style transfer. And they thought the creatives | would have the safe jobs! Ha! | ricochet11 wrote: | see the film "The Congress" where Robin Wright does exactly | this | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE | lijogdfljk wrote: | Yup. As an aspiring indie game dev i eagerly await large | scale emotive text to speech. Being able to write a script | and have it "acted" for a fraction of the cost, possibly free | if i build it myself, is kinda mind blowing. | sangnoir wrote: | I can see studios licensing upcoming actors in perpetuity for | a pittance. Alternatively, they can synthesize a persona that | never ages/complains, and have dozens on nameless grunts be | the underpaid talent -like the thousands of people who've | donned Goofy suits for Disney | [deleted] | pmontra wrote: | Too much exposure. I'm thinking instead about a dozen more | young Sean Connery 007 movies, ten more young Harrison Ford | Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, etc. diluted in the next | 30 years. Replace with any other star and repeat for the next | century. I guess that copyright could be extended to faces | and the usual 75 years after the death of the actor. Studios | will take care of that. | throwaway675309 wrote: | With the rise of really good neural TTS engines that can re- | create voice actors with a high level of accuracy, I've been | predicting the same thing will happen in cartoons and anime | for years now. | wsinks wrote: | I've been thinking it, but I haven't seen someone else write | it - see ya in 2025 Belter. | UmYeahNo wrote: | Pretty sure that's already a thing, not for movies per se but | for ads where a celeb can license their avatar - 3d model and | voice for use in ads. Especially useful when they want the | celebs lips to move correctly when the ad is translated into | non-native languages. | postalrat wrote: | Similar technology has been around for a while and so far it's | only generated a few laughs and some use in the film industry. | | GPT-3 hasn't taken over social media. | | Dall-e 2 hasn't put all graphical artists out of a job. | shynrou wrote: | ..., yet. Mostly because of the tech being decently locked | down by license and limited access currently. At the pace | these models are developing it's pretty much unthinkable that | it will not have a big impact in the next 20 years. | postalrat wrote: | Access is limited by the hardware you have access to. | Forget about training, just running these models takes a | lot of memory. | anigbrowl wrote: | Get back to me in 5 years. | mandmandam wrote: | I dunno. A lot of the worst stuff this could be used for kinda | pales in comparison to what's going on already by different | means. | | Like, if you're trying to smear someone, using big media and | abusing the courts to fuck them up (say, Assange or Hale or | Reality Winner) makes this look like a Fisher Price toy club | next to an uzi. | | If you're trying to sway an election, the big data and subtle | ads (and again, big media and the courts) makes far more of a | difference than this. Think Brexit, Trump 2016, the count in | Florida in 2000, Diebold machines, etc. | | If you're trying to topple a government / make taxpayers pay a | huge bailout / start an illegal war / etc, etc, etc - this is | just another small tool; the leather punching tool on a vast | penknife. | | ** | | Conversely, the creative potential may be larger than most | suspect. To me, this feels like we're getting close to | something like the holodeck in Star Trek, where people can | share the fruit of their imagination with anyone for virtually | no cost (IP lawyers shudder, like Lionel Hutz imagining a world | without lawyers). | sebmellen wrote: | This is perhaps the most impressive "AI" demo I've seen, and | that's saying a lot. Interesting to read about the Moscow-based | "Samsung AI Center" that seems to be producing this work: | https://research.samsung.com/aicenter_moscow. | ansible wrote: | There are still some issues to be worked out, such as how the | head shape distorts in some examples, but overall, this is very, | very impressive work. | | Back in the old days, Disney and other animation studios | rotoscoped actors performances by drawing over the original image | (by hand) each frame. It won't be long now before you just have | an artist create a few examples of concept art, and just video | the performances of the actors without much / any special setup | other than maybe wearing a tracking suit. | | How many years away are we from the point where you can just type | in a script (or just put in some writing prompts and have an AI | generate a script), describe the direction for the actors ("bend | over and pick up the bucket", "exit stage left"), and then just | churn out a movie? | | If you pick up just a little bit of skill with animation, | compositing, and such you're a one-person movie studio. Crazy | times. This is not what I imagined the future was going to look | like, but it will be entertaining. | keawade wrote: | We've got AI assisted rotoscoping already and while it looks a | bit janky at times its still a whole lot faster than doing it | all by hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo | anigbrowl wrote: | _describe the direction for the actors_ | | What actors? There are a lot of writers who will jump at the | opportunity to skip all the translation and re-interpretation | by others and directly build the visuals as they go. Some of | this will be extremely cringeworthy, but a lot of it will be | astonishingly good. | moondev wrote: | This is seriously incredible. Coolest thing I have seen in a very | long time. Curious how long it takes to render one of the short | example clips shown. | shimonabi wrote: | This is so impressive it acutally scares me. | hansword wrote: | "Neural Head Avatar" is not a good name, but it sure beats | "deepfake". | baxtr wrote: | I wonder how this could be used by a state actor to manipulate. | malshe wrote: | This is incredible! When I look at all the advances in computer | vision and NLP in the last five years, I can't believe the pace | of advancements. I have stopped saying "AI can't do ____ in our | lifetime" to my friends. | tomcam wrote: | Holy shit | roughly wrote: | There's something almost humorous about the last video being | narrated by a text-to-speech system - hearing a system that | clones human speech describe a system that clones human motion | really adds a surrealist touch to the whole thing. | anewpersonality wrote: | The deepfake industry just got a lot bigger. | reidjs wrote: | When will something like this be available to the average user? | zitterbewegung wrote: | It already is https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com is powered | by StyleGAN [1] . Its on GitHub at [2] | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StyleGAN | | [2] https://nvlabs.github.io/stylegan3/ | 1f60c wrote: | The photos at the top of the page are the researchers--the | demos (two videos) are a bit further down the page. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-20 23:00 UTC)