Also between hair, eyebrows and eyelashes where they overlap.
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Yeah. It’s a common issue with these systems. I’ve seen the output of another generator that’s clearly based entirely off celebrity red carpet photos. This results in images that are both absurdly photogenic and mostly young-skewing, fairly white faces and a smattering of older black male faces (that end up having a distinct Idris Elba vibe, as he was obviously part of a small image training set when it came to non-white faces).
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It’s not so crude as “separate a face into individual components and reassemble them.” Each feature is being generated. Nothing in the image is coming directly from any source material - it’s all being produced based on a mathematical “understanding” of image features.
This article is technical, but it demonstrates something about the level of abstraction in the facial generation:
Since no element of the image itself gets used in the output, it would be a worrying expansion of copyright if it covered these images… It would be like copyright covering the music you listened to before creating something entirely new.
Yeah, as soon as Photoshop came along, we did. (Which is why child pornography laws were amended to include illustrations.) I’m sure this will bring it up again, though.
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Where the glasses frames cross the eye, they warp.
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I found many of them very convincing. One thing that stood out was the neck or jaw line often seems out of wack.
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Not sure I agree… See the Shepard Fairy “Hope” case or “Ice Ice Baby” as counter examples. Neither of those “entirely new” creations included any piece of the original image/recording, but they were still found to be in violation of copyright. I’m not saying those were the right decisions, but they are somewhat similar to this case.
Obviously there are lots of other ways that a face-generator like this would not constitute infringement (maybe you can argue that it’s akin to caricature, or maybe they’re all creative-commons licensed?). It’s definitely a unique and interesting edge case. Still, if I was a photographer whose photos were scraped for this purpose, and this outfit was making money without compensating my labor… Well, I’d want to be compensated. Sometimes art works have “no value” until someone uses them and thereby creates said value.
Whether something breaks copyright in many cases comes down to the will and resources of the aggrieved party. As long as they grabbed images of “nobodies” and aren’t somehow making a massive amount of money, they’ll be fine.
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Although these kinds of copyright cases that don’t involve actual copying of content do involve copied musical compositions (with the number of changed notes being insufficient) or designs. Though it’s true that there have been plenty of copyright cases that - wrongly, in my opinion, for the most part - expanded copyright to include “feels like” and “looks like.” It would be a stretch to say we even have that here.
True, but the value here was “your photos were publicly available to be looked at, and we looked at them.” It would be a weird and worrying expansion of copyright to include this kind of use. Especially since we’re talking about photographs where ultimately it’s the people’s faces that are the important bit. It might not be copyright law that ends up being relevant/altered, but the kinds of trademark laws covering the creation of celebrity look-alike images. (“It’s not the actual image of Tom Cruise, but it has a definite ‘Tom Cruise quality’ to it…”)
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Whois says Google owns the site. I wonder what their intentions are with it.
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So now we know what lies on the far side of Uncanny Valley. The Shimmer.
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When it says “this person does not exist”-- there’s a big difference between constructing faces from actual, sampled images and constructing CGI faces from scratch. It seems these are all the former.
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Anyone else notice that the glasses are not symmetrical? I looked at 20 different faces that have glasses and the left and right halves of the glasses are not the same frames. The shapes of the frames around the lenses are often pretty close, but the most noticeable differences for me are at the hinges. Sometimes the difference is subtle, but all that I’ve seen so far have had this difference.
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And the earrings. If there are two earrings, they’re never similar…
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I have a compelling desire to keep refreshing until I see myself…
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I’m pretty sure I have seen parts of Jon Stwewart and Christina Ricci in my results so far, and lots of other parts that look familiar bit I can’t quite pinpoint.
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dante’s peeky boo
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Whoa. Seems like someone could generate a face, give that person a name and a story, make them a media star . . . and no one would realize it’s not a real person.
Double whoa. Maybe it’s already been done.
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I suspect also that the Jon Stewart and Christina Ricci influence gets reinforced by other celebrities that have similar faces, too.
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