pretty sure the pepperoni on that pizza is made out of human lips

August 30, 2019 12:43 PM

Using machine learning facial prediction to create absolutely Cronenbergian nightmare extrapolations of low-resolution emoji.
posted by cortex (15 comments total)

Life is suffering. 🤢
posted by Fizz at 12:52 PM on August 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

What it does to the Sonic sprite still looks better than the CGI for the movie.
posted by biogeo at 12:57 PM on August 30, 2019 [8 favorites]

shower thoughts

it just occurred to me (and I'm probably not the only one who thinks this).... that looking for facial features is what we do as a species with images, so of course we train computers to do it....

however, we already have an AI that has been shaped to view everything through one training set, and it does so with brutal efficiency at a scale that dwarfs current ML efforts

the input is "human activity"
the computer is "late capitalism"
the training set is "profit"
the resultant output's ....distortions.... are significantly more disturbing than these.
posted by lalochezia at 1:08 PM on August 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

I love this kind of thing! Reminds me of some the nightmare-fuel I got out of the early days of the deep dream image manipulator...
posted by deeker at 1:08 PM on August 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

The melted ice cream Goomba is pretty cute, though.
posted by me3dia at 1:17 PM on August 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

The original photos must have already been part of the training corpus for the AI. The hair details are too accurate to merely have been extrapolated from the pixels.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:24 PM on August 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Some look like Georges Méliès's moon face.
posted by doctornemo at 1:33 PM on August 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yes I knew the fountain one reminded me of something
posted by bleep at 2:24 PM on August 30, 2019

The photoreal chimp emoji looks like a makeup test for the new Cats movie.
posted by ejs at 2:39 PM on August 30, 2019

That AI really overestimates how many people can pull off a John Waters-style pencil moustache.
posted by theory at 3:05 PM on August 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

Do androids dream of electric C.H.U.D.s?
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:27 PM on August 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I’m happy with all of these results. Like...wow.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:53 PM on August 30, 2019

In 2008, I kept my 12 year old son entertained while travelling by showing him how to do 16x16 pixel images by hand in MacPaint. I kept making the challenges harder, but he rose to the occasion every time. Here's his 16x16 pixel rendition of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war: https://imgur.com/a/kYyqgE3 The AI would be helpless here.
posted by stonepharisee at 3:07 AM on August 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

These... give me acid flashbacks. Which probably says something interesting about human visual processing and its failure mode and how that’s analogous to whatever the algorithm is doing here. But I can’t think of it, because I’m too distracted by the reminder of how all of the edges of the furniture in my living room can dissolve into sparkling feathers with little or no warning.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:00 AM on August 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

That's very interesting !
posted by NathalieBou at 10:04 AM on September 10, 2019