Ganvatar
Pioneer Square Labs
Although some of them might look familiar, all of these portraits are computer-generated by a machine learning model called “StyleGAN”. While most of the recent excitement around StyleGAN centers around its amazing ability to generate infinite variation, the emergent semantics encoded in the latent space are impressive as well.
For instance, faces in this space allow for some semantic vector math, reminiscent of word2vec’s “king - man + woman = queen”. We can find the latent representations of, say, smiling people. We can then average them and create a new semantic vector that, when added to pictures of non-smiling faces, makes them all smile.