Links to related projects in anime art generation for those interested:
Waifu Labs v2, referenced in this post (generate amazing custom anime face images): https://waifulabs.com (write-up is the above link: https://waifulabs.com/blog/ai-creativity)
This Anime Does Not Exist (AI-generated anime-style artwork): https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai (write-up https://www.gwern.net/Faces#extended-stylegan2-danbooru2019-... and https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist)
This Waifu Does Not Exist (AI-generated anime-style faces): https://thiswaifudoesnotexist.net (write-up: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#twdne)
There's also a lot of literate on e.g. automatic manga coloration, auto-translation, image superresolution, anime frame interpolation, and much more. Worth checking out some places like https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch/ if you're interested!
This is extremely impressive. It’s the first GAN I have seen which lets you tweak the result in a meaningful way rather than being just random.
I think the speed that GANs have come in to the world has really shaken people up and it’s hard to process what this all means and what it will result in. Especially the ones which generate based on real people.
But the feeling this gives me, is what happens for the future of art. Sure, this example is no where even close to replacing real artists, but it’s already generating images better than I can draw after a year of practice. It does give me a feeling of “what is the point”. Which might be an irrational feeling, but I’m sure others feel the same.
This isn't really creativity is it? I like to call stuff like this statistical copying, and indeed, the linked Wikipedia article on GANs says:
> Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set.
There isn't a creative process here nor any creative introspection going on. While the technical results are impressive, this article does not address creativity even superficially, and just slaps the label on. There isn't any AI either. It's machine learning, i.e., statistical models and algorithms.
I made a waifu, then I pressed save. It wanted me to signup so I pressed back so I could just rightclick saveas but... I lost my waifu forever now :(
> Step 43636: During this phase, the training gets unstable at times, so we have snapshots of occasional horrors like this.
Ah, make that three things the public shouldn't see being made: sausage, legislation, and waifus.
I wish I had the stones to call my company Waifu Labs
I can’t wait for this technology to come to video.
Imagine a future where people can compile written scripts into Hollywood quality movies.
The explainer video about gans is top-notch! Excited for Arrowmancer!
This is mind-blowingly good. You keep pushing the state of the art further to the point of broad applicability. It won't be long until everyone can be an artist without putting in the ten thousand hours of drudgery of training their muscles, hand-eye coordination, structure of shape and perspective, etc. I can't wait!
Do you have a team page? How many of you are there? Do you work with gwern and nearcyan? Are you going to raise for this? (You should totally scale this!)
Great work, and keep it up!
It's funny how people complained about github copilot 'stealing' people code, but nobody here complained about this AI 'stealing' artworks.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against this, but I think we should start discusing morality of AI generated content, even if it doesn't train on existing artworks/code.
The image quality is good, but now I realize I'm experiencing "uncanny waifu". Authentic character designs bear two things in common:
1. Simplifications of reality(the actual artist training method would be traditional studies off life and photo reference followed by gradual reduction and symbolization to a style)
2. Symbolic meaning. Things like the style of eyes, clothing, etc are all meant to signal personality. This is stuff that current AI techniques don't really touch upon in any direct sense.
Since the ML method is built on interpolating off final results, it's going to lack in these qualities and produce something that is consistently an "average impression". Akin to asking the algorithm to generate mythical heroes by mashing up the various stories: you get a hero that is somehow the average of Icarus, Heracles and Achilles, which would be less of a character than the originals.
I found the most interesting part was the evocative comment about the 'vast and parched' nature of the latent space.
I wonder if the OP's intuition regarding the sparseness of the latent space, and the relatively small area occupied by the 'useful' manifold? embedded within it provide us any clues as to what symbol grounding might look like for some neuro-symbolic infrastructure that sits atop that latent space.
I.e. how should we be trying to represent concepts like 'male' and 'female' within that space?
Is it important to have these concepts represented as a low dimensional manifold?
Is it important that this manifold be easily described by some simple geometric form like a convex polytope?
Is it important that nuances and variations on the concept be separable within the bounds of the concept-specific manifold?
What other properties might be important?
What methods are there to estimate how many unique characters a model can generate? The answer is not infinitely many, but determining when two images are of different 'characters' is fuzzy.
I hope these generators expands into non waifu / pretty boy anime depictions. There's a lot anime gaijin faces out there to explore.
So putting some Anime digital illustrators out of work? ....or I could see many simply use them and pretend they did it themselves?
Obvioisly there will be plenty of illustrators doing custom work that these can't (yet) replicate.
Also good for those countless anime avatar'd Twitter users.
Amazing work and progress. The previous version appears almost toyish in comparison.
FYI uBlock Origin complains about the registration link, because it on "Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list".
I would be interested to find one I like and use it for a desktop companion project, not an original idea but I am not an artist ha.
Is there any way to approximate embeddings for a novel image?
novel meaning user provided, not generated by the model or in the training set.
Have you considered applying similar models to VR avatar creation? That's a market in itself
This tool has many applications, and those that will make you rich isn't about anime.
any good info on manipulating the "control vectors" in the latent space?
Cool, it's like an AI-generated picrew
project name is kinda incel cringe :(
Amazing now I can create my own anime girl!
I don't want to go all SJW on you guys, amazing work, but can you try to make sure there's an inclusive array of starting faces please? Talking about things like skin tones, thanks!
Hey HN, one of the team members here!
I hope you all enjoy playing with the new and improved generator! We've been hard at work improving the model quality since the last time the site was posted[1]
As both a professional fantasy illustrator & software engineer, I find the concept of AI creativity so fascinating. On one hand, I know that mathematically AI only can hallucinate images that fit within the distribution of things that it's seen. But from the artist perspective, the model's ability to blend two existing styles into something so distinctly new is so incredible (and not to mention also commercially useful!)
Anyways, happy to answer any question, thoughts, or concerns!
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511459]