Can you talk a little about team size, work process, funding and revenue stream? I think the effort required for such an undertaking is vastly underestimated by readers.

My question is, how do you figure out how to parameterize "Same character, different pose" / "Same character, different eyes" / "Same character, different gender" / etc?

My (super limited) understanding of GANs is that they slowly discover these features over time simply from observation in the data set, and not from any labels.

So how could you make e.x. a slider for head position, style, pose, etc? How do you look at the resulting model and figure out "these are the inputs we have to fiddle with to make it use a certain pose"?

You mention it a bit in this section, but I didn't fully understand: "By isolating the vectors that control certain features, we can create results like different pose, same character"

And I assume the same step needs to be done every time the model is retrained or fine-tuned, because possibly the vectors have shifted within the model since they are not fixed by design?

A couple questions:

1) I didn't really understand how you went about identifying what vectors of the latent space stand for various things, like pose or color. Did you train one of the AIs to that effect, or did you manually inspect a bunch of vectors, twiddling through them one by one, did to the outcome?

2) If one were to train an AI to the same level using commodity cloud services, what's the order of magnitude cost that you would pay for the training? More like $100, $1,000, $10,000 or $100,000?

Does this mean two weeks of development, or two weeks to generate the images we're seeing? Or maybe did you train the model for two weeks? That point just wasn't exactly clear for me.

I've seen a number of mobile games that just get flooded with characters; this tool looks like it could be used to automate that process. It could be combined with AI-generated character profiles as well, creating an 'infinite' character roster in video games.

In humans, things like the pupil can be the give away.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2289815-ai-can-detect-a...

Is there an email to reach out to you or someone in the team? ($HNusername @ gmail)

I think I could use this for a project.

>> It is interesting to note that from this process, the AI is not merely learning to copy the works it has seen, but forming high-level (shapes) and low-level (texture) features for constructing original pictures in its own mental representation.

Can you explain what you mean by "mental" representation? Does your system have a mind?

Also, why are you calling it "an AI"? Is it because you think it is an artificial intelligence, say like the robots in science fiction movies? Is it capable of anything else than generating images?

From urban dictionary:

   "Waifu" is used to refer to a fictional girl or woman (usually in Anime, Manga, or video-games) that you have sexual attraction to, and you would even marry.

Arrowmancer is really our first attempt at scaling it up; hoping to do even cooler generative AI-related in that production.

Just a thought, I don't really know anything about ML.

For TADNE, Arfafax ran Danbooru2019 and a few million TADNE samples through CLIP to get the image embeddings, and clustered them; when the two sets of clusters were graphed using tsne, you could see that the TADNE StyleGAN2-ext did a lot of mode-dropping in that many smaller outlying clusters of characters/franchises/topics simply did not appear in TADNE samples. The TADNE looked like a big galaxy, while Danbooru2019 looked more like it was surrounded by archipelagos. TADNE was extensively trained on them and was a very large model, but the GAN dynamics & StyleGAN architecture mean it didn't do a good job absorbing rarer/more idiosyncratic Danbooru2019 image-clusters.

I expect newer generative models which avoid GAN losses and which use more flexible (but expensive!) architectures, like DALL-E, would perform much better in terms of mode-dropping, so you'd see a lot more unique characters/images out of them. (I'm very excited about them. As good as TADNE or Waifu Labs v2 may be, I think they are still far behind what could be done with just existing data/arch/compute.)

If you're OK with being tracked, you can permanently allow that domain.

More things for, like, adults?

step 2: NFT all the things

step 3: profit

step 4: GOTO step 1

step 5: automate steps 1 to 4

Comparing photography to hand drawn art is silly. They are two different mediums.

Your company could be the first to capture the market. I guess if you can sleep with the consequences of your work,who cares? Im not judging because if its not you, it will be someone else.

Personally i think we as a society need to step back and press pause and really consider the consequences of this technology, and even existing technologies.

If you become rich, could you set up a charity for all the future starving artists, if that future comes to pass? I dont want to live in a world where theres no room for human creativity.

Not an artist, just a concerned human.

Then you need attributions for said previous arts, all of it, at least going by texts of laws.

Yes, people still play, but they no longer create.

With the exception of Adversarial attacks on particular algorithms, no human is creating new Chess theory, discovering new openings, for example.

As a game, challenge, competition, social activity, chess is alive and well.

As a creative endeavour, or vehicle for discovery, Chess is solved. It is no longer an art of its own.

We're part way through this transition now with Go as well. New opening theory, new joseki, new strategies are being played by robots, and at the highest professional levels we are playing catch-up to understand.

For art it feels a bit different since it’s not competitive and more a practicality thing. Perhaps art will shift from placing individual strokes on an image and move to making creative directions for AI to resolve in to an image or enable more people to create labor intensive works like animation.

For example, humans don't need to see millions of examples of waifu before they can draw their own.

Also, humans can draw in different styles, including novel styles that look nothing like styles they have seen before. Statistical models like GANs can only draw in styles similar to the ones in their training sets.

Statistical modelling can only represent the data in a training dataset and is incapable of novelty. Humans are capable of novelty.

>> Well describe to me the way it is different to the processes of the human brain?

We haven't created the human brain and it's very unlikely it uses a technology we understand, like linear algebra.

This is no less shallow reasoning. The question of whether the academic field of statistical modelling already contains the necessary ideas to produce strong AI is not decided, and won't be unless/until somebody makes a strong AI. People have different intuitions about what the answer will be and until it can be determined empirically I suggest treating them as what they are: intuitions.

Our ability to make the decision between following the rules and breaking the rules, when suitable. A computer could also break the rules, but in most cases it wouldn't make sense or look like good, while a human could make judgement about when to break the rule. Sure, we all learn by copying, but after a while, we start getting a feel for when to break the rule, and that's when unique art appears. Computers seems to not have learned this fact yet (or rather, haven't been taught that yet).

Using the tool that this submission offers, all the results will look similar and can be traced back to the training set you give it. Do something similar with a human (over similar amount of time that the machine got, in terms of human time) and eventually the results will look way different than the training set, as what we see with artists in real life.

For something like the original post, we do know what these things are. They're statistical models. Full stop. They show no indication of what we see in creative and intelligent behavior, that is the ability to self-adapt to both internal and external initiatives. This GAN in the post has no ability to step outside of the statistics in the training set unless the model is updated to prod it to do so. The model can be changed, but it is a forceful change. If you show me tens of thousands of images, I am not, at an emergent, top-level, system level, etc., bounded to the statistics of that image set. Is this GAN asked something or given a goal aside from an implicit "draw something like what we've given you"? Even if I do draw something like or akin to the given image set, I have full creative control over the image (assuming some drawing skill).

If the human brain (and really body) can be modeled via a statistical model (which is not yet known but is surmised as you imply), that doesn't necessarily explain high-level behaviors. More is different. You call it magic sauce, but others call it emergence. Our understanding of emergent behavior and complex systems at large is still in work.

In my view, metaphorical thinking, of which analogical thinking is a subset, is a likely kernel of human intelligence. While these statistical models are copying, which is similar in a way to analogy building, it's not quite there. The reason things it generates looks like other things is because it searched a parameter space for matching statistics. However, it cannot even explain that's why it generated what it did. We explain for it. These things are no more artificially intelligent than things like thermodynamics are naturally intelligent.

Lastly, as I pointed out in my original comment, if this is indeed creative as someone like you implies, the article fails to make a convincing argument and bounces around a lot of buzzwords.

> I find it very irritating that such shallow reasoning prevails amongst intelligent people.

I was offended, but I suppose I agree. ;)

Sure it can, but then it's not considered anime anymore. I think this sentiment is confusing genre with training set constraints. A new model is not required for some artist to do something different from anime or even an anime artist to do something different. Humans can self-adjust all with approximately the same base model (whatever that is).

The sole definition of intelligence is under heavy load of reconsideration the last decades with the emergence of a better knowledge of animal cognition, for example.

I just don't see anything intelligent yet. People somehow have gotten confused with the success of machine learning being treated as intelligence. We have a lot of statistical models of things that are very successful, but those aren't considered intelligent. For reason, machine learning telling you something about data has suddenly been treated as AI. Machine learning can do some impressive things, but I think its short-sighted to equate AI and machine learning.

Intelligence is really a tough thing. Watching a video of even a single-cell organism displays a sort of intelligence and behavior far beyond anything I've seen of machine learning. So why is it intelligent? Or is it intelligent? I'm not entirely sure, but my point is that machine learning is orders of magnitude incapable of describing (i.e., modeling) even the simplest self-directed and self-adapting behavior that we see in the real world.

/s?

Indeed, it contributes to the variations problem.

also: If the discriminator starts off perfect, then the generator can't learn to be better.

Sort of like a human learning to play chess: If you start off with top-tier opponents that crush you, then you don't have a gradient to learn from. Instead, you need players at your own level to grow your skills.

I don't define art. It's a sense, not a logical box you can put things in.

Receiving money for your art is one thing; going out of your way to use it as a means of living is another. The work immediately becomes tainted, and is no longer art.

It could be an amazing piece, but if your line of work is receiving money for what you create, you're an artisan, not an artist.

A character drawn for an RPG is not art. It is not a work of art. It is a graphic designed for utility. That is all it will ever be.

The sublime nature of art is there because it transcends everyday vulgarity. One transcends mere personage and becomes an artist by being in the world, but not of it.

The more money an artisan makes, the more his craft suffers. He almost always improves his technical ability through this process (otherwise, he would not make money), but loses his soul, and will never be an artist. He does not have the fiber in his heart that allows one to suffer through all manner of anguish, and material poverty, to dedicate oneself towards something above oneself; so he settles for being an artisan.

I can understand not being educated on these matters. But the amount of misplaced confidence you carry, writing on things you know nothing about is detestable.

If your inquiries into the nature of humanity and what it means to be are genuine (and not mis-attributed self-importance), my recommendation is to read and listen more, and talk less.

Matthew B. Crawford's works are a decent bridge into all that, for the modern middle crust who feels something stirring in his soul, and needs a direction.

If you feel like your assessment of your own abilities is honest, then I would completely skip anything modern, and begin with Burke's A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. I will even buy you an unabridged copy and have it shipped to you, if you're a starving artist that cannot afford it (and my respect for you would increase, all the same).