These are some of the most amazing generated images I’ve ever seen. Introducing BigGAN, a neural network that generates high-resolution, sometimes photorealistic, imitations of photos it’s seen. None of the images below are real – they’re all generated by BigGAN.
The BigGAN paper is still in review so we don’t know who the authors are, but as part of the review process a preprint and some data were posted online. It’s been causing a buzz in the machine learning community. For generated images, their 512×512 pixel resolution is high, and they scored impressively well on a standard benchmark known as Inception. They were able to scale up to huge processing power (512 TPUv3′s), and they’ve also introduced some strategies that help them achieve both photorealism and variety. (They also told us what *didn’t* work, which was nice of them.) Some of the images are so good that the researchers had to check the original ImageNet dataset to make sure it hadn’t simply copied one of its training images – it hadn’t.
Now, the images above were selected for the paper because they’re especially impressive. BigGAN does well on common objects like dogs and simple landscapes where the pose is pretty consistent, and less well on rarer, more-varied things like crowds. But the researchers also posted a huge set of example BigGAN images and some of the less photorealistic ones are the most interesting.
I’m pretty sure this is how clocks look in my dreams. BigGAN’s writing generally looks like this, maybe an attempt to reconcile the variety of alphabets and characters in its dataset. And Generative Adversarial Networks (and BigGAN is no exception) have trouble counting things. So clocks end up with too many hands, spiders and frogs end up with too many eyes and legs, and the occasional train has two ends.
And its humans… the problem is that we’re really attuned to look for things that are slightly “off” in the faces and bodies of other humans. Even though BigGAN did a comparatively “good job” with these, we are so deep in the uncanny valley that the effect is utterly distressing.
So let’s quickly scroll past BigGAN’s humans and look at some of its other generated images, many of which I find strangely, gloriously beautiful.
Its landscapes and cityscapes, for example, often follow rules of composition and lighting that it learned from the dataset, and the result is both familiar and deeply weird.
Its attempts to reproduce human devices (washing machines? furnaces?) often result in an aesthetic I find very compelling. I would totally watch a movie that looked like this.
It even manages to imitate macro-like soft focus. I don’t know what these tiny objects are, and they’re possibly haunted, but I want them.
Even the most ordinary of objects become interesting and otherworldly. These are a shopping cart, a spiderweb, and socks.
Some of these pictures are definitely beautiful, or haunting, or weirdly appealing. Is this art? BigGAN isn’t creating these with any sort of intent – it’s just imitating the data it sees. And although some artists curate their own datasets so that they can produce GANs with carefully designed artistic results, BigGAN’s training dataset was simply ImageNet, a huge all-purpose utilitarian dataset used to train all kinds of image-handling algorithms.
But the human endeavor of going through BigGAN’s output and looking for compelling images, or collecting them to tell a story or send a message – like I’ve done here – that’s definitely an artistic act. You could illustrate a story this way, or make a hauntingly beautiful movie set. It all depends on the dataset you collect, and the outputs you choose. And that, I think, is where algorithms like BigGAN are going to change human art – not by replacing human artists, but by becoming a powerful new collaborative tool.
The BigGAN authors have posted over 1GB of these images, and it’s so fun to go through them. I’ve collected a few more of my favorites – you can read them (and optionally get bonus material every time I post) by entering your email here.
It’s been 24 hours since a friend showed me a megacompilation of TAZ John moments and i’m still thinking about it.
Like especially that Final Parley scene. I can’t stop thinking about that scene and trying to envision what that would look like, especially in a comic format.
so, i only went in to get the shiny silvally code. should’ve taken like a minute or two at most but i was in there for upwards of ten. it was deeply unsettling right off the bat when i walked in because it was quiet. like really quiet. the tv that plays the gaming news and the speaker that plays the ads weren’t running. the cashier says hello and i get in line to wait. it is dead silent. nobody in the store is making any noise except for the cashier, who is typing. she’s helping a little boy sell 12 PS4 games. the boys mom is walking back and forth behind him sipping her gas station brand cup of coffee. literally just walking back and forth from one end of the store to the other. all the while the entire store is silent, the kid is silent, the mom is silent… all 5 of the other full grown adults in this store are silent. and i’m the only one in line behind this kid, these other adults throughout the store are like standing in one space just staring and being quiet. they weren’t browsing, they weren’t talking. nobody was making any noise. i wasn’t making any noise. i was standing there thinking about how eerily silent it was in this gamestop and wondering what the hell was going on – hyper aware of every move i made because i didn’t want to make a noise and break the silence. this carried on for literally 10 minutes before another cashier came in through the front door and loudly exclaimed “i can’t leave you alone for five minutes.” he called me to the counter and asked me what i needed help with. it was like immediately the ambient noises of gamestop all returned at once and i stepped forward to get my code.
my favorite part of this is the implication that not only was the first cashier somehow responsible for the eerie silence to begin with but also that this has certainly happened before
i have many obscure john ships… here, have one of them.
38:
“You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?”
The beach, the sunset and Merle all disappear, and there is only white void. John stands, and has a look around. The formless, shapeless white seems to stretch on forever, and the only objects there besides him are numerous colorful disks floating about. They’re planes, John realizes. A silly impulse wants him to grab one and pop it in his mouth, but he doesn’t.
Then something… shifts, something changes, and John is no longer alone in the void. Across from him, a Presence has manifested. It’s hard to see, white against white, impossible to see, John reckons, for a normal human. But John isn’t a normal human, so he can make out a person-shaped outline, if he squints.
Besides, he’s felt this Presence before, a long, long time ago.
“Oh, it’s you,” he says. His bitterness barely carries in this void.
“You remember me.” The Presence sounds pleased.
John shrugs. He had forgotten. It’s just now coming back to him that his vendetta was against a person, this person, and not just the abstract concept of eternity. Sinking into the mass of the Hunger, becoming one with trillions of others, merging and forgoing his own individuality, most of his personal memories had faded, leaving only his discontent behind. Now, in death, he’s a person again, and he remembers.
“Why are all these planes here?” he asks.
The Presence explains it to him. Apparently they’ve had the same talk with Merle and his friends a short while ago. They’ve given the Presence a name, Jeff but also Andrew… Jeffandrew.
“That’s ridiculous,” John says. The Presence didn’t have a name when he first met them, and they were disguised as a human then. John now again remembers taking the Presence home. How the Presence told him he was “one of the most interesting stories here… your world’s gone so bad, but you’re still good, you’re still bright…” Well, he was different then.
He remembers how the Presence showed him eternity. How they shushed him when he screamed, stroked his hair when he cried, held him in his catatonia. Turns out mortal humans weren’t and aren’t meant to view the fullness of space and time all at once.
It was meant to be a favor.
“You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?” Jeffandrew asks. They reach out two glistening, astral non-hands and cradle John’s face in them. It feels… good. Like being close to the Light of Creation again. John’s still craving it even now; he almost huddles closer. “You’ve been thinking about meeting me again.”
“Oh, yes.” The way John imagined this would go is very different from the reality of the situation. Ideally, he’d have all his powers from the Hunger – ideally he’d have grown so powerful as to rip reality to shreds and expose the cruel, capricious creator who made this universe and then abandoned it to rot. Now he’s just a dead human, brought here by Jeffandrew’s will.
He squints again to get a good look at the barely visible outline of a person before him, then he swings and punches where the jaw would be.
His fist connects with something, and Jeffandrew reels back, their non-hands flying up to their non-face. “That was uncalled for,” they say.
“It’s the least I could do.” John shakes the life back into his hand and grimaces. He’d thought this would be some sort of hugely cathartic moment, but it isn’t. After everything that happened, this… just isn’t really what he wants anymore.
“That was for making the universe shitty,” he says nonetheless, and Jeffandrew chuckles.
“Still full of rage, huh?” they ask. “You’re still my favorite anyway.”
John bites his lips. Damn. That shouldn’t make him blush after all these eons.
“John, listen,” Jeffandrew continues, “I have an offer to make.”
Jeffandrew suddenly has an object in their hands, an object that John’s way too familiar with: they’re holding the Light of Creation.
“Gimme it.” The words are out of John’s mouth before he can stop them. His whole body clamors loudly with craving. He’s needed this for so long.
Jeffandrew clutches it a little tighter. “I will give you it,” they say, to John’s considerable surprise, “but not to use like you did. John, come with me, and I’ll show you how the Light is meant to be used. Come with me and join my people and make stuff with us. I know you can do it. I watched you make your little pet project, I watched you tear through my planar systems… you definitely have it in you to create and destroy like one of us.”
John holds a breath that, being dead, he doesn’t need to take. He furtively looks around the void for a clue that this is a prank. He was expecting some kind of punishment to happen after death, not… this. “I don’t… why are you offering me this?”
Jeffandrew shrugs their astral non-shoulders. “Honestly, it’s a matter of pride at this point. I mean, you called my planar systems badly constructed. You called me cruel, aloof, merciless and a dozen other things. I really just want to give you this Light and see you do better.”
“Oh?” A challenge. That’s more like it.
“And my people totally don’t have a bet going on how you’ll do.”
“Is that so.” John straightens his back. Well, he’s dead. He has nowhere else to go. It sounds like an enormous responsibility, telling his own stories, creating his own planar systems, but isn’t this, in a way, the kind of thing he always wanted? A chance to get to do better? “Fine, lead the way, Jeff…andrew.”
Jeffandrew tucks the Light under their non-arm and extends the other non-hand to John. “Great, let’s go then. I have so much to show you.”
ppl managing to live where they grew up is really bizarre to me
Hi! Croatian here. As an inland country, I found a job processing uranium. We have a lot of it.
God I wish I was processing uranium in Croatia
I think about this post every day
Hey, another Croatian here! Croatia has a coastline and I can’t find a single mention of uranium in Croatia. I don’t know what kind of paralel universe this person is from.
PTA archive 