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Welcome to Waifu Labs v2: How Do AIs Create?
- spywaregorilla 5y agoIs there any way to approximate embeddings for a novel image? novel meaning user provided, not generated by the model or in the training set.
- liuru 5y agoNot at the moment in our tool, though this is an area of great curiosity and research for us!
- spywaregorilla 5y agoDoes the discriminator model translate the images into an embedding space of it's own? Could such a space be used to generate images themselves?
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoI 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!
- newobj 5y agoAnime has a pretty severe "representation of blackness" problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi2_S6kBgIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi2_S6kBgIg is one video discussing this). I'm afraid to imagine what a model trained on that source content would generate.
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- liuru 5y agoIndeed, we spent 2 years working on this!!! It's an extremely hard research problem, because darker skin tones account for only about 0.3% of all anime art produced in the world. We have employed an absolutely exhaustive array of art and data science tricks to give the model the ability to draw darker skin tones, though they are underrepresented. The results that you see today are the culmination of many months of careful tuning! It's not definitely perfect, but from a data science perspective, this situation can't be rectified until the art world makes a shift. Personally, I hope that more art representing dark skin tones will be created in the world!
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoThanks, happy to hear that you guys are on top of it.
- pfisherman 5y agoI can’t understand why the GP comment is flagged. If you can look past all the “culture war” stuff, this is pointing out some of the limits of algorithmic creativity. It does not do well generating instances with features that are not well represented in the training dataset. Compare this to human creativity. I suspect that fulfilling GPs request would be almost trivial for a human professional artist. To be clear this is an amazing achievement, a creative use of the technology, and a positive contribution to the world. Pointing out limitations (i.e. areas with potential for future innovation) does not diminish it.
- Simon321 5y agoThat's because humans have also seen a lot of human beings with diverse skin tones. If we had only seen anime our whole life it would be much more difficult for us to conceive of also. With more compute, we will eventually be able to make bigger models with more knowledge of the world that will also be able to overcome this.
- pfisherman 5y agoI think that is correct, but also a much much easier said than done when it comes to the implementation.
- greenn 5y agoHonestly asking, isn't this stuff usually Japanese characters? I dunno if theres even "data" they could use for other skin tones
- userbinator 5y agoOn the other hand, you get a full spectrum of eye and hair colour.
- jacobolus 5y agoIn Japanese anime, ethnically Japanese characters are regularly represented with unusual hair and eye colors, to help distinguish them from each-other. Including e.g. purple eyes or blue hair not naturally seen on humans.
- numlock86 5y agoWell, there is (or rather was) "ganguro" at least, which appeared in mangas an animes occasionally, too. Not sure how many people would be getting offended by that these days, though.
- jhanschoo 5y agoGanguro is associated with a certain Japanese subculture and aesthetic, and not meant at all to represent darker-skinned races. There are works that feature a more diverse cast, but perhaps the proportion of representation accurately reflects what you would see in Japanese society.
- numlock86 5y ago> Ganguro is associated with a certain Japanese subculture and aesthetic, [...] Yes. What's your point? > [...] and not meant at all to represent darker-skinned races. No one ever claimed that. The question to my post was simply where to possibly get data from for "darker skin tones". Ganguro seems like an option because ... well, darker skin tones? Care to elaborate why you bring up "representation of darker skinned races" up in this context?
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- bmitc 5y agoThis 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.
- zaik 5y ago> There isn't any AI either. It's machine learning, i.e., statistical models and algorithms. I always thaught those were synonyms.
- xcambar 5y agoBoth the A and the I in AI are debatable terms. 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.
- kortex 5y agoWhy is the A[rtificial] under debate? It's not natural (biological) intelligence, unless one goes the route "humans are a part of nature therefore the things we make like plastic and skyscrapers and hamburgers are natural".
- xcambar 5y agoIt needs to be wondered whether drawing a face or winning a game of go may or may not actually be real intelligence, only very narrow. We like to think that AI is only statistical models, which may be true (is true?), but we have no idea that what happens in brains is anything else than a highly optimised, deconstructed, such model. Current datasets need 10ks pics of a cat while a kid only need to see a cat twice? Good for the kid, but there's no hint there's a fundamental difference of process.
- aimor 5y agoWhat 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.
- gwern 5y agoIt's hard to say, but I think a useful measure would be to look at mode-dropping compared to the training data. Whatever the 'number of unique characters is', it clearly ought to be at least as large as the characters you see in the original training data, right? 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.)
- suction 5y ago
- temptemptemp111 5y ago
- Ygg2 5y agoPainting with a brush stroke set to galaxy levels. I'm not saying there isn't creepy anime, or even creepy motifs in excellent anime. But that stuff sells over there.
- nautilius 5y agoI'm not assessing whether it is creepy or not, but how can 'it sells' have any place in that argument?
- Ygg2 5y agoBecause if you are a mangaka/anime artist, you'll be pressured to add otaku stuff to boost sales.
- nautilius 5y agoAnd then -- pedophile content is ok for you? Wow.
- Ygg2 5y agoYou say pedophile, they say legal age of consent. I think it's different set of mores. Although it's complicated the age of consent depends on prefecture, age and circumstances and it's around 13 year old. And anime throw wrenches by having people's apparent age being different than their actual age. Take for example ReZero, where female heroine is 118 year old elf that looks like an average 17-18 year old, but has the same knowledge as a 12 year old human. This of course squicks out main protagonist who's about 17. Even though by applying our social mores, he'd be in the right. Different mores, different opinions. I honestly don't care too much about them. They are most often just stupid thing for Otakus to obsess about. And you are very fixated on pedo content, when the Otakus content is much, much broader see (and just as degenerate) - loli yuris, incest, BDSM, any combinations of previous, etc. And these are just tips of the shitberg.
- Kuinox 5y agoIt'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.
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- 7373737373 5y agoHave you considered applying similar models to VR avatar creation? That's a market in itself
- Tade0 5y agoAmazing 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".
- pgl 5y agoThat's because it bounces the registration link through a tracker. If you're OK with being tracked, you can permanently allow that domain.
- liuru 5y agoHey 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! --- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511459]
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoSo neat! Where are you based? Boston, I assume? Is there an email to reach out to you or someone in the team? ($HNusername @ gmail)
- Cixelyn 5y agoSan Francisco! Just sent over a ping!
- darkengine 5y agoIs the code or any of the models available to the public? I'd love to mess with this on a local GPU cluster.
- liuru 5y agoNot at the moment! A similar project that I really admire is public, though! https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/
- searchableguy 5y agoDo you plan to provide an API to generate waifu? I think I could use this for a project.
- kadokaelan 5y agoThe explainer video about gans is top-notch! Excited for Arrowmancer!
- Cixelyn 5y ago(link for the lazy: https://youtu.be/Pab8pG5WbXQ https://youtu.be/Pab8pG5WbXQ) Thanks so much! It's done by our fantastic animator[1]! GANs are quite interesting and we didn't see many approachable explainer videos targeted at lay people, so we decided to make one ourselves! [1] https://twitter.com/bumblingbeebo https://twitter.com/bumblingbeebo
- Bombthecat 5y agoIs there a gameplay video? Or at least screenshots of arrowverse?
- Cixelyn 5y agoHere's our current game trailer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WvRgb6kh4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WvRgb6kh4s
- slimsag 5y agoFor the author: there's a small typo "Discrimniator" instead of "Discriminator" in the video at 1:11 One thing I was confused by: the video says the discriminator "AI" is trained to detect true vs. generated results, with the hope the generator becomes good enough to fool the discriminator. But why is the discriminator useful, then? Couldn't you just tell generator "AI" whether the result it produced was true or not? I think the answer is.. you don't want just a perfect recreation of the training data you gave to the generator, instead you want the generator to produce variations of that training data, so there's a "how would you know if it's 'a true result' / good enough?" problem. So the discriminator is useful because it's not a direct comparison, but rather a "this looks approximately good enough" comparison of the true vs. generated result. This all makes me wonder: what sort of data set needs to be fed to the discriminator to train it? Is it some sort of "true image" and "true image w/bad alterations (e.g. lines, scratches, etc.) to it" data set?
- ve55 5y agoLinks 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 https://waifulabs.com (write-up is the above link: https://waifulabs.com/blog/ai-creativity https://waifulabs.com/blog/ai-creativity) This Anime Does Not Exist (AI-generated anime-style artwork): https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai (write-up https://www.gwern.net/Faces#extended-stylegan2-danbooru2019-aydao https://www.gwern.net/Faces#extended-stylegan2-danbooru2019-... and https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist) This Waifu Does Not Exist (AI-generated anime-style faces): https://thiswaifudoesnotexist.net https://thiswaifudoesnotexist.net (write-up: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#twdne 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/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch/ if you're interested!
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI can’t wait for this technology to come to video. Imagine a future where people can compile written scripts into Hollywood quality movies.
- thewarrior 5y agoIt's already begun https://twitter.com/somnai_dreams/status/1477411531037937664?s=21 https://twitter.com/somnai_dreams/status/1477411531037937664...
- FeepingCreature 5y agoI wonder what will happen when somebody combines a GAN with a feature recognizing network like the Tesla cars use, so it can use its own extrapolated map of the surroundings to stabilize its output as the camera moves around.
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- JetAlone 5y agoI think it will have its limits, but the possibilities for editing together, supplementing and modifying products from smaller AI modules should stretch out what you can do on a small budget.
- ps91 5y agoAmazing now I can create my own anime girl!
- soolinder 5y ago
- Gigachad 5y agoThis 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.
- AStrangeMorrow 5y agoIf interested in an other project that offers good tweaking, artbreeder (artbreeder.com) has been around for a while too. You have different models to play with (faces, anime, general, buildings, paintings etc...). Not all of them have the same level of quality and customization, but for example if you go for the face one, you get a really high level of customization: "cross-breeding" of 1 to 8 faces and then tweaking of many attributes (gender, color theme, age, ethnicity, realism, and other various details).
- bmitc 5y agoArt isn't about statical copying or drawing well. It's about human expression.
- Gigachad 5y agoThese generated pieces look extremely similar to real human art so they look very expressive to me. And you can even add your own input by hitting refresh until you get something similar to what you wanted.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago> And you can even add your own input by hitting refresh until you get something similar to what you wanted. that is the exact opposite of creation. I'd put it this way: this is the IKEA of drawing.
- deft 5y agoI 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 :(
- jimmygrapes 5y agoThis is like the condensed story of humanity
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoWaifu is kept in memory, normies.
- tsukikage 5y ago"Keep precious things inside you, or you will lose them"
- twic 5y agoIt's okay, Step 43636 will come to console you in your dreams.
- keewee7 5y agoThis is why we need local self-hosted AI. Keep the waifus safe.
- jcun4128 5y agoCould have been an NFT
- satronaut 5y agocomment of the year, and it's not even friday
- ASalazarMX 5y agoI mourn for your lost perfect waifu, but if it helps, your comment likely saved other waifus because we clicked [Download] instead of [Save].
- echelon 5y agoThis 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!
- dirtyid 5y agoI hope these generators expands into non waifu / pretty boy anime depictions. There's a lot anime gaijin faces out there to explore.
- aniforprez 5y agoI would like to see how it generates late-80s/early-90s style features. The current pool of anime art styles are very generic (aside stylistic outliers) and I'd love to see Cowboy Bebop/Akira/Bubblegum Crisis type character designs
- echelon 5y agoMiyazaki's style of character design and fantasy would be amazing.
- neuronic 5y agoI'd be curious if such a GAN could actually beat Oda at generating new One Piece characters. 20 years into it he just doesn't seem to stop at creating hilarious characters.
- the_af 5y agoAgreed. In many ways Miyazaki's style is "nonstandard" for anime, possibly because he was partly inspired by European artists (think Moebius, whose influences can be seen in Nausicaa for example).
- liuru 5y agoThis one has some rough-looking ones! They're a bit rarer than most.
- jakey_bakey 5y agoI wish I had the stones to call my company Waifu Labs
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI didn't know what you meant so I googled it. The technology is cool, but the content is ... problematic. 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. Huh.
- harpersealtako 5y agoA big part of it you're missing is that it's a joke. Anime fans definitely know they're weird, and are very passionate about the things they like (and are conscious of that), and thus a lot of humor in the community is self-deprecating and ironic (for example, calling your favorite fictional character your "waifu" or "husbando"). The fact that outside observers might think it's "problematic" is kind of the whole point.
- kadokaelan 5y agoyoud be surprised at the waifu market size
- tasha0663 5y ago> 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.
- akomtu 5y agoThis tool has many applications, and those that will make you rich isn't about anime.
- sandos 5y agoOh, I see what you are saying.... More things for, like, adults?
- peoplefromibiza 5y agostep 1: generate random waifu step 2: NFT all the things step 3: profit step 4: GOTO step 1 step 5: automate steps 1 to 4
- scollet 5y agoIt needs to make money?
- w_t_payne 5y agoI 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?
- jcun4128 5y agoI 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.
- syntheweave 5y agoThe 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.
- someone7x 5y agoCould it work backwards? Eg, to take a hero like Heracles and determine he's say 40% shared with Gilgamesh. Then we might see that even the originals aren't very unique. Just a thought, I don't really know anything about ML.
- rambojohnson 5y agoproject name is kinda incel cringe :(
- dmix 5y agoSo 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.
- ausbah 5y agoany good info on manipulating the "control vectors" in the latent space?
- easrng 5y agoCool, it's like an AI-generated picrew