This is a video developed by Everyone is Happy Productions which is a “boutique multidisciplinary design company providing mappings between existing and emerging technologies, arts workers and communities.” The video demonstrates the use of machine learning to develop lyrics and syncopated animation.
“All of the animation is made in real-time using a StyleGan neural network trained on the Danbooru2018 dataset, a large scale anime image database with 3.33m+ images annotated with 99.7m+ tags.”
A StyleGan (Style-Based Generator Architecture for GANs) is a machine-learning architecture which can be used to generate artificial imagery. A famous, and notorious example of a StyleGan is ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com which displays imagery of artificial faces produced by a computer.
We have seen how the use of deepfakes can be disruptive to the identification of faked news, however, the implications of this type of synthesized media in pop culture are equally as paradigm changing.
The development of this type of media should challenge us to ask important questions such as:
- What are the potential opportunities for synthetic art?
- What are the potential pitfalls of using synthetic performers in pop culture?
More info about the video is available here.
For more info about StyleGANs, check out this informative article.
