{"id":3244,"date":"2019-11-25T11:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T17:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/?p=3244"},"modified":"2019-11-24T19:06:19","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T01:06:19","slug":"this-blog-post-does-not-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/this-blog-post-does-not-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"This Blog Post Does Not Exist…Or Does It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shout out to those hard-working generative adversarial network<\/a>\u00a0(GAN)! Ok, I don’t really know about hard-working, but it is pretty cool. Let’s review.<\/p>\n

Intro to GAN<\/h2>\n

GAN\u00a0technology came out\u00a0in\u00a0internally at Nvidia, the computer graphics company, in 2014<\/a> and released publicly in 2018<\/a>\u00a0(as StyleGAN). The studies are linked.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to pretend I understand the details of either\u00a0study. But based on the Wikipedia article linked above, what I can explain is that a GAN is the result of two\u00a0neural networks\u00a0that compete against\u00a0each\u00a0other, in one of those mathematical, strategy “games” researchers like to play.\u00a0 The networks study photographs (or text) and then decide which elements to use to\u00a0generate something new.<\/p>\n

I think some people will find\u00a0it creepy, but I think it’s cool. For the human photos, it’s hard to not project a humanity into the faces, even though, logically, these are people that have never existed. The generated fake people seem, somehow….special.<\/p>\n

Here’s a quick intro to some GAN and some links to explore. Enjoy!<\/p>\n

\n

Explore Some Fake Stuff<\/h3>\n

As I said above, one of the possible outputs of a GAN can be a surprisingly realistic looking photographs. View some of them at thispersondoesnotexist.com<\/a>. Every time you refresh, you get a new person that has never existed. It’s like dreaming for computers.<\/p>\n

This github repository<\/a> has a list of a few more websites\u00a0of GANs that\u00a0generate photographs of humans, fake\u00a0rental ads, articles, anime, and more results\u00a0that don’t exist. There are fake cats, but computers seem to have trouble with animals. I suggest not looking at them. (They’re creepy.)<\/p>\n

Test Yourself, Human!<\/h3>\n