[HN Gopher] MegaPortraits: One-Shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars
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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.
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