Sunday, December 10, 2017

Reality Generators


What's real these days? Remember a few years ago an application that takes 5 consecutive photos of your family and blends them together so that nobody is blinking or making a stupid face? It takes the best faces of every person in the series of photos, and puts only that face in the picture. The final, fused photo documents a moment that never existed. Rather then, it is not documenting a moment, it is creating a moment.

Moving on, we now see an application that creates faces from scratch. The system looks at thousands of faces and learns what a face is, and then creates its own faces.

I'm thinking here about facial recognition and how I would like to now have a 'fake' face for a face so that nobody knows what my real face looks like. Can I do that? Better yet, can I have a nice little progam that makes entirely fake pictures from scratch, uses them to populate a fake facebook page, and then makes fake friends with their own fake pictures all talking to each other - an entirely fake social ecosystem or social network? Can we do that? How fake can we get until the fake thing is bigger than the real thing?


These People Never Existed. They Were Made by an AI.
Oct 2017, futurism.com

As part of their expanded applications for artificial intelligence, NVIDIA created a  generative adversarial network (GAN) that used CelebA-HQ’s database of photos of famous people to generate images of people who don’t actually exist. The idea was that the AI-created faces would look more realistic if two networks worked against each other to produce them.

Engineers develop novel techniques to trick object detection systems
Apr 2019, phys.org

A projector had far too much fun with car tech
Feb 2020, phys.org


Phantom attacks -- similar to adversarial image spoofing -- the thing is that we don't believe the car doesn't see the way we see. We can tell a projected image is not a real thing, and we assume an adversarial image is a fuzzy picture of nothing. But we don't know what it's like to see as a car sees, these spoofs work because they go unnoticed by us.


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