Uncanny Valley yet again ...

This person does not exist

A person who says they created the site popped up on Hacker News to explain what was going on. The website cycles through the results of a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which basically means that two AI systems duel each other to create a realistic imitation of something — whether it’s a caricature, a level of DOOM, or a person’s portrait.

In this case, the GAN was built by Intel researchers and trained on photos of people’s faces, according to research published to the preprint server ArXiv last week that the author shared in the Hacker News post. However, the same algorithm has also been trained on images of anime faces and paintings, resulting in terrifying animations.

It gets better.

IN 2015, CAR-AND-ROCKET man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public.

The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well—scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system. But when OpenAI’s researchers configured the system to generate text, they began to think about their achievement differently.

“It looks pretty darn real,” says David Luan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, of the text the system generates. He and his fellow researchers began to imagine how it might be used for unfriendly purposes. “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” Luan says.

Beyond our control seems to apply here, does it not?