Say What? AI Can Now Generate Whole Real-looking Bodies Of People

Not enough praise can be sung about the wonders of AI in this world. AI has given us smart cars, drones, enhanced social media feeds, Google Maps, PUBG, et al. AI helps with facial recognition; it can generate realistic face images of humans (hint: deepfakes). In a nutshell, AI is killing it. Now it turns out that AI can also generate the entire body of people who don’t even exist. Yes, as creepy as it might sound, it’s true and AI has proved (yet again) just how groundbreaking it can get.

A Kyoto-based firm DataGrid recently developed an advanced “automatic whole-body model generation AI”, which can automatically generate high resolution (1024 x 1024) full-body images of non-existent people with hair, face, clothes, body, and all. The tech startup had also come out with ‘idle generation AI’ back in summer 2018 but was limited to generating only face images and lacked the ‘expressive power’, mentions the press release.

So the company decided to enhance the power of the generated face and start exploring ‘whole body generation’ and ‘motion generation’, at which they succeeded. Generally, when companies attempt to generate superficial images, there’s always a caveat (either the color bleeds out from the background or faces seem asymmetrical). But, DataGrid has managed to do away with all of that, producing high precision images.

DataGrid made use of a deep learning method called GANs or Generative Adversarial Networks which can produce photographs that look superficially realistic to the human face. GAN works by learning from large amount of data that is fed to it. Similarly, DataGrid fed the GAN large number of whole body images via which it learned to produce similar looking body images.

The company believes that this automatic generation of full-body model AI can be a huge turning point in the advertising and apparel industry where the companies would no longer have to spend money on production (photo lights, camera, etc) and models, because they’ll already have virtual models in place. The company also hopes to further improve the overall accuracy of the generated whole-body models and will also be conducting demos with the advertising companies to show just how effective the whole-body models can be.

DataGrid released a video where it shows multiple models quickly transition into other models. Now, although it sounds and looks like an absolutely genius idea and can make major breakthroughs in the fashion and apparel industry (as DataGrid hopes), we can’t help but question the potential side effects of the whole experiment.

We’re pretty aware of how dangerous AI can get (self-driving vehicles accidents, misuse of facial recognition tech, etc) and this whole-body experiment leaves room for a lot of misuse occurrences. Deepfakes have already become a big toxic nuisance for people and are majorly tampering with the digital health.There are already face-swap porn videos of girlfriends, politicians, classmates, colleagues, etc that have been generated with deepfakes. And this new experiment can take all that a step further to massively manipulate the public.