Ghost and GANs in the Metaverse
How Hollywood Character Design Can Inform Virtual Beings
Chapter 1 — AI Makes Real Faces
Before reading any further, do just one thing: open this website or if you prefer type the URL: www.thispersondoesnotexist.com [1] It shows you images of faces. It’s a simple website that proves an incredible point — software can draw imaginary people now:
Every time you go to this page, you see a picture of a new human face which was generated by AI. If you hit refresh you see another, and another — and it’s scary to witness. Using hard tech and machine learning on curated datasets, AI can now invent the representation of a human face in images with lifelike quality. You can try any parameters, creating someone older, younger, uglier, prettier, with red hair and green eyes, or whatever you type in.
It’s not simply pasting photograph cutouts together from real pictures, like Truman Burbank with a magazine and scissors from that tragic film [2]. Instead the AI is wholly imagining these faces from memory of what it learned makes the essence of faces, and it’s easy because the AI has a Machine Learning model trained using a dataset of many thousands of pictures.
When does a face become a filter? What makes us real in the digital realm? What part of us joins a metaverse when we’re in it? For years, we’ve plugged VR headsets on to smartphones, or joined in Web browsers trying to traverse immersive yet choppy digital worlds. Many companies have tried starting new worlds, advertising in others to test the response. I first enjoyed a journey into a metaverse on WorldsAway by CompuServe. I was amazed to see people across timezones chatting as a child realizing time zones, and how we can communicate live in different seasons and hemispheres.
Metaverse uses today include chat for personal and business communication. People don’t love working in offices for the most part, though I could think of a few fun places in California to work. It’s clear however that business communication will use these, from Zoom to VR apps of the future. It’s fun and easy to present your best self, ready to work and collaborate with your friends, through an avatar and a microphone.
Will it work and survive as a business people pay to participate in? That’s unclear. Sometimes simpler is better. The original video-telephone of the ’50s was cancelled, as people didn’t love having to prep their outfits and make-up just to take a quick call.
It might detract from the enjoyment of gaming and social worlds, by having business spaces along side the fun ones. The gaming community is the other major side of VR and Metaverse development, with all of todays most-used properties originating from Xbox and Playstation chat rooms.
Chapter 2 — Hollywood Character Inspiration
The film industry create works of art which are more than just “recorded versions of people” to put it blandly, interacting in a saved time-series of content to gaze at. We want to see incredible characters, across history and genre, and play games with great storytelling and more tales around every turn. AI helps with the:
- Extras (digitized extra characters, e.g. filling fans in a stadium on Ted Lasso, or NPCs in a game using Inworld AI)
- Terrible evil characters (which many actors don’t want to play and get typecast, e.g. Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs)
- Interesting characters, which perhaps no human actor could play convincingly (e.g. God, aliens, or an AI itself)
Hollywood and human theatre has been inventing and portraying characters for generations. We learn and we enjoy, sometimes scolding but always learning from characters in story. Watch great episodes of the Netflix hit show called “Black Mirror”, each illustrating hour-length topics in science-fiction with major societal consequences — including AI, Metaverses, AR/VR, and more [3]. One that stands out involved Big Tech learning and uploading entire personalities, having dead people living in the metaverse.
They also illustrate the concept of a “virtual hell”, like depicted here also from Black Mirror of trapping a “synthetic” consciousness in a virtual reality (like being trapped in “The Matrix” with the Agents controlling existence itself):
Chapter 3 — Human Models Online
A model trained on tens of thousands of hours of real video data still can’t capture a full human persona — because we evolve! Daily humanity is always at the forefront of media input and ideas.
If you spend a lot of time in VR (or your grandkids will) think about this: Curious communities today in VR are recording their likeness, hour by hour — and year by year. One new site lets you “live forever” by uploading your persona to a metaverse blockchain [4]. Forward-planning businesses could train a model on all the years you spend in their metaverse, and when you die in real life you can be reimagined online for friends and family. We can’t be sure what happens when the ghosts talk to other ghosts, and beyond — a scary thought!
So what’s this all mean? The world goes on, and it’s clear that movies, games, and VR will play a huge roll — “metaverses” or not. It’s both exciting and scary to think of a metaverse populated with virtual beings and long-dead personalities there, and how they might interact with us and each other in perpetuity.
References
Cover image from Wired Magazine (Samsung Research Moscow — Egor Zakharov; Aliaksandra Shysheya; Victor Lempitsky)
[1] Website: “This Person Does Not Exist” (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) by: https://lucidrains.github.io/
[2] Image generated by G.A.N. (May 2022):
Using: StyleGAN2 — Karras et al. and Nvidia. See more (links from author to: learn [1] [2] [3], code [original] [simple] [light]).
[3] The Netflix hit show “Black Mirror” episode referenced:
Black Mirror (Netflix) highlights:
- San Junipero (Black Mirror): https://youtu.be/g0iz_JyZBEo?t=221
[4] Somnium Space (Metaverse company)
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