Wednesday, December 21, 2016

How To Make Any Celebrity Smile

A little AI, et voilà:

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rl0-XE5snorB0yRBzhWVxH7_hao=/0x0:538x323/920x613/filters:focal(226x119:312x205):no_upscale()/cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52378925/smile_net.0.gif

From the Verge:
Smile Vector is a Twitter bot that can make any celebrity smile. It scrapes the web for pictures of faces, and then it morphs their expressions using a deep-learning-powered neural network. Its results aren’t perfect, but they’re created completely automatically, and it’s just a small hint of what’s to come as artificial intelligence opens a new world of image, audio, and video fakery. Imagine a version of Photoshop that can edit an image as easily as you can edit a Word document — will we ever trust our own eyes again? 

“I definitely think that this will be a quantum step forward,” Tom White, the creator of Smile Vector, tells The Verge. “Not only in our ability to manipulate images but really their prevalence in our society.” White says he created his bot in order to be “provocative,” and to show people what’s happening with AI in this space. “I don’t think many people outside the machine learning community knew this was even possible,” says White, a lecturer in creative coding at Victoria University School of design....MORE