My useless father is “writing” me notes once more

Rising up, if I needed to experiment with one thing technical, my dad made it occur. We shared dozens of tech adventures collectively, however these adventures have been minimize brief when he died of most cancers in 2013. Because of a brand new AI picture generator, it seems that my dad and I nonetheless have yet another journey to go.

Just lately, an nameless AI hobbyist found that a picture synthesis mannequin referred to as Flux can reproduce somebody’s handwriting very precisely if specifically educated to take action. I made a decision to experiment with the approach utilizing written journals my dad left behind. The outcomes astounded me and raised deep questions on ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the private which means behind handwriting itself.

Past that, I am additionally blissful that I get to see my dad’s handwriting once more. Captured by a neural community, a part of him will stay on in a dynamic approach that was inconceivable a decade in the past. It has been some time since he died, and I’m now not grieving. From my perspective, it is a celebration of one thing nice about my dad—reviving the distinct approach he wrote and what that conveys about who he was.

I admit that copying somebody’s handwriting so convincingly may deliver risks. I have been warning for years about an upcoming era the place digital media creation and mimicry is totally and effortlessly fluid, but it surely’s nonetheless wild to see one thing that seems like magic work for the primary time. It is tempting to say we’re moving into a brand new world the place all types of media can’t be trusted, however in actual fact, we’re being given additional proof of what was all the time the case: Recorded media has no intrinsic truthfulness, and we have all the time judged the credibility of knowledge from the repute of the messenger.

This fluidity in media creation is completely exemplified by Flux’s strategy to handwriting synthesis. One of the vital attention-grabbing issues in regards to the Flux answer is that the ensuing handwriting is dynamic. For essentially the most half, no two letters are rendered in precisely the identical approach. A neural community just like the one which drives Flux is a big net of possibilities and approximations, so the imperfect move of handwriting is a perfect match. Additionally, in contrast to a font in a phrase processor, you possibly can natively insert the handwriting into AI-generated scenes, similar to indicators, cartoons, billboards, chalkboards, TV photographs, and rather more.

It is price noting that neither I nor the one that not too long ago found that Flux can reproduce penmanship have been the primary to make use of neural networks to clone handwriting—analysis into that extends again years—but it surely has not too long ago grow to be virtually trivially cheap to take action utilizing both a cloud service or consumer-level {hardware} when you have the writing samples available.

This is how I introduced a chunk of my dad again to life.

The invention

As a every day tech information author, I regulate the newest improvements in AI picture era. Late final month whereas looking Reddit, I seen a publish from an AI imagery hobbyist who goes by the title “fofr“—pronounced “Foffer,” he instructed me, so let’s name him that for comfort. Foffer introduced that he had replicated J.R.R. Tolkien’s handwriting utilizing scans present in archives on-line.

Foffer initially made the Tolkien mannequin accessible for others to make use of, however he voluntarily took it down two days later when he started to fret about folks misusing it to create handwriting within the fashion of J.R.R. Tolkien. However the handwriting-cloning approach he found was now public data.