The adage “Seeing is believing” is no longer true.

Three researchers, Ming-Yu Liu, Thomas Breuel and Jan Kautz, working for Nvidia, have created an AI that can generate life-like images.

In their system, multiple neural networks learn together by trying to fool each other with better and better solutions to the problem at hand. These are generative adversarial networks or GANs.

See their paper and GitHub. A sample below:

My take: this is kinda scary. Neat to think of “environmental” filters to add to genuine footage (think Nighttime, Winter, Rainy, etc.) but that this technology can create genuine-looking unreal footage is downright Orwellian. How do we distinguish true from fiction, real from fake? The only conclusion is that everything is now suspect. Sad.