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 had 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 one more journey to go.

Lately, an nameless AI hobbyist found that a picture synthesis mannequin known as Flux can reproduce somebody’s handwriting very precisely if specifically skilled 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 that means behind handwriting itself.

Past that, I am additionally comfortable that I get to see my dad’s handwriting once more. Captured by a neural community, a part of him will reside on in a dynamic approach that was not possible 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 might deliver risks. I have been warning for years about an upcoming period the place digital media creation and mimicry is totally and effortlessly fluid, but it surely’s nonetheless wild to see one thing that looks like magic work for the primary time. It is tempting to say we’re getting into a brand new world the place all types of media can’t be trusted, however in reality, we’re being given additional proof of what was at all times the case: Recorded media has no intrinsic truthfulness, and we have at all times judged the credibility of knowledge from the repute of the messenger.

This fluidity in media creation is completely exemplified by Flux’s method to handwriting synthesis. One of the crucial fascinating issues concerning the Flux resolution is that the ensuing handwriting is dynamic. For probably 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 internet of possibilities and approximations, so the imperfect circulate of handwriting is a perfect match. Additionally, in contrast to a font in a phrase processor, you’ll be able to natively insert the handwriting into AI-generated scenes, akin to indicators, cartoons, billboards, chalkboards, TV photos, and far more.

It is value noting that neither I nor the one that lately found that Flux can reproduce penmanship had been the primary to make use of neural networks to clone handwriting—analysis into that extends again years—but it surely has lately develop into virtually trivially cheap to take action utilizing both a cloud service or consumer-level {hardware} when you’ve got the writing samples available.

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

The invention

As a every day tech information author, I control the most recent improvements in AI picture era. Late final month whereas searching Reddit, I seen a submit from an AI imagery hobbyist who goes by the identify “fofr“—pronounced “Foffer,” he informed 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 model of J.R.R. Tolkien. However the handwriting-cloning approach he found was now public information.