How an A.I. ‘Cat-and-Mouse Game’ Generates Believable Fake Photos

The New York Times is running a very fascinating article on the progress of the artificial intelligence and machine learning in both identifying and generating fake photos – How an A.I. ‘Cat-and-Mouse Game’ Generates Believable Fake Photos.   The above image shows the progress of the AI working against itself and learning from its own results – one part is trying to identify if the photo is fake or not, and the other part is trying to generate a fake photo which will pass the test.  When the test fails, the system learns, improves, and tries again.  Look at the last row of photos, which are super realistic and took the system between 10 to 18 days to learn how to generate.

But that’s not all.  It gets better, and I quote:

A second team of Nvidia researchers recently built a system that can automatically alter a street photo taken on a summer’s day so that it looks like a snowy winter scene. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have designed another that learns to convert horses into zebras and Monets into Van Goghs. DeepMind, a London-based A.I. lab owned by Google, is exploring technology that can generate its own videos. And Adobe is fashioning similar machine learning techniques with an eye toward pushing them into products like Photoshop, its popular image design tool.

Here are a few more photos that were generated:

This is remarkable.  But if you keep reading the article, you’ll quickly discover that there is even more to it.  What’s next in line after pictures?  You are correct: videos.  You better sit down before you watch this video, showing Obama’s lip sync:

So, can’t trust the TV.  Can’t trust the Internet.  Who do you trust?

Obama orders Federal Agencies to digitize all records

When Barack Obama got elected the President of the USA, there was a lot of hope around the world. Hope, I think was the single word you could use to describe all the noise around it. Sure, the first black president, the first presidential candidate to seriously use the Web and social networks, all the talks about change and “Yes, we can”. It gave hope. But since he actually became president, the realities of the real life kicked in. Things are not as simple as they seem. Even for the presidential candidates.

Regardless of how many promises he fulfilled or failed to fulfill, I still think that the election of Barack Obama as the President of the US was an important step forward. One particular area that I think he made an important contribution to is Open Government. And no, I am not a complete idiot, and I don’t think that the US government is now open and transparent, without any corruption. It is not. But it is much better than it was even a few years ago. And most importantly, the issue of government openness and transparency has been promoted by Barack Obama from a nice tea talk subject to one of the primary presidential candidates’ concerns. There is little choice left for all the future candidates – they WILL have to talk about it and, consequently, do something about it. Even if they try to avoid the issue altogether, I don’t think they can anymore. Not for a long term.

Slashdot reports today that Barack Obama pushed the game one more step. He ordered all federal agencies to digitize all their records.

President Obama this week issued a directive to all federal agencies to upgrade records management processes from paper-based systems that have been around since President Truman’s administration to electronic records systems with Web 2.0 capabilities. Agencies have four months to come up with plans to improve their records keeping.

Now that’s huge!

And it’s not a simple project at all. If you think it is or if you can’t imagine what it takes, here is an informative Slashdot comment that explains a tiny part of it, just enough for you to get the idea of the complexity involved.

There’s the first problem. It’s never simple.

First issue – if you’re going to put documents in, you’re going to want to get them out. How do you search for them? You’re going to want to define the metadata, and that’s a headache. Got lawyers? They’ll want client and matter. But those fields are just about meaningless to anyone else. How do you resolve the incompatibility? Do you use different forms for different groups of users? How will the engineering department find the subpoena papers that the lawyers filed?

What fields are globally useful? Are they so generic that any search will retrieve hundreds of documents? Conversely, are they so specific as to make your metadata field selections horribly long and therefore ambiguous? (Free text metadata? Let’s not go there.)

Remember that you’ve got to fill in that metadata any time you add a document. What’s the balance between useful and annoying? Too many fields and nobody will want to fill it in. Too few, and you won’t be able to find anything.

That’s for new documents. When you first implement a DMS, you have a truckload of documents to be imported. You’re not going to do it manually, you’re going to use an auto-import. But how do you define the metadata for all those millions of documents you’re importing? What if you have client/matter, for instance? Hopefully they’re all already sorted, and you can use something like Kofax Capture, a seriously powerful and fast scanner, and separator sheets on which you can do forms recognition to define the metadata fields. But there’s a lot of work involved up front to get that import working properly.

Don’t forget the OCR. Hopefully all your paper documents are clean and will OCR nicely, so you can do full text indexing.

Security. Better get that set up right. Profile level security? It’s more secure, but people will complain that they don’t know if a document is there and they just need to request access because profile level security means if you don’t have permissions to access a document it won’t even show up in your search results. Groups. And by the way, remember to define the permissions on all those millions of documents you’re importing.

Version control. How do you control check in and check out? Do you control check in and check out, or just audit it?

I’ve only just scratched the surface of a document management system. Then there’s records management. You’ll want to make sure your system is DoD 5015.2 compliant. Setting up the retention schedules…hopefully you’ve got a records retention policy already, otherwise that’s months worth of work to define those policies and ensure you comply with all regulatory requirements while still balancing your need to purge/archive old records.

How does something even become a record? Hopefully you’ve already got knowledgeable librarians (yes, that’s what they’re called), and you just need to train them on your new RM system.

Are all your boxes already barcoded? Your RM system should be able to register where a record is – building, shelf, box.

You’re probably getting the idea. The technology is easy. The processes are complicated, and they get exponentially more complicated as the size of your client base grows.

As I said, I don’t think that this is the final and ultimate solution. But it is an excellent step forward. Once again, this gives me hope that things will eventually become way better than they are now.

On Barack Obama win

I haven’t been following the US presidential race closely.  I remember watching a few speeches by Ron Paul, and thinking that he is a really nice guy.  But somehow I doubted that he could win.  Barack Obama’s speeches were the next best thing, even though I saw just a few of them.  Here is a quote from Slashdot discussion on the subject, that I particularly enjoyed:

The thing that absolutely amazes me is the international reaction to Obama’s win. I knew that the reputation of America and Americans had been battered over the past few years, but I never suspected that it was as bad as it was. I watched the results last night, said a little “huzzah!” when Obama was declared, listened as McCain gave a warm, dignified, and gentlemanly concession speech, and then went to bed thinking I’d seen it all. I woke up at about 4:45 this morning and I’ve been flipping between news stations ever since. I got a little emotional last night during the speeches, but I’m absolutely devastated by the number of non-Americans who are dancing in the streets over Obama’s win. I never thought I’d see video of a few hundred Chinese people jumping around and chanting “Obama! Obama!” A reporter in France walked up to a woman and simply said “Obama?” Her face lit up and she simply said “C’est formidable!” Kenyans are throwing feasts in his honor. Arab and Persian states are happy. Israel is happy. Pakistan is happy. Australians are losing their damned minds over it. Russia is… well, they’re kinda grumpy, but they’re not having a good year.

(read the rest of the comment)

Well, I guess I am in the happy and joyful crowd.  It feels like something big happened.  But we are yet to see if this feeling has any substance.