Neural networks have created Frankenstein celebrities from thousands of pictures of real ones, and they’re freakishly realistic. It really makes you wonder how easy it would be to falsify a celebrity’s existence. Maybe in the future, we’ll worship people who don’t even exist. Or maybe we’re already doing it.
Scientists at Nvidia have trained two neural networks to create synthetic celebrities. The system creates faces from photos of actual celebrities.
One neural network creates the faces while the other evaluates those faces. They run in a loop, increasing in resolution and accuracy until the picture looks like a real famous human.
The results are actually quite impressive. The faces look realistic and certainly pack a lot of star power. They are familiar and unrecognizable at the same time. Like flipping through a People Magazine from an alternate reality.
Most celebrity gossip and tabloid fodder is fake to begin with. Perhaps Nvidia are conceiving an all new entertainment industry where the celebrities are fake too.
While the results are impressive, the in between states of celebrity synthesis are pretty horrifying.
For deep meditation on the possibility of fake celebrities, check out this hour long video of celebrity generation soup.
Images: Youtube / Tero Karras FI