My lifeless father is “writing” me notes once more

Rising up, if I wished to experiment with one thing technical, my dad made it occur. We shared dozens of tech adventures collectively, however these adventures had been reduce quick 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.

Just 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 method utilizing written journals my dad left behind. The outcomes astounded me and raised deep questions on ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the non-public which means behind handwriting itself.

Past that, I am additionally completely satisfied 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 unimaginable 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 period the place digital media creation and mimicry is totally and effortlessly fluid, nevertheless it’s nonetheless wild to see one thing that appears like magic work for the primary time. It is tempting to say we’re entering 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 data from the popularity of the messenger.

This fluidity in media creation is completely exemplified by Flux’s strategy to handwriting synthesis. One of the crucial attention-grabbing issues concerning 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 internet of chances and approximations, so the imperfect circulation of handwriting is a perfect match. Additionally, not like a font in a phrase processor, you may natively insert the handwriting into AI-generated scenes, akin to indicators, cartoons, billboards, chalkboards, TV pictures, and way more.

It is value noting that neither I nor the one who 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—nevertheless it has lately change into virtually trivially cheap to take action utilizing both a cloud service or consumer-level {hardware} in case you have the writing samples readily available.

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

The invention

As a day by day tech information author, I keep watch over the newest improvements in AI picture era. Late final month whereas shopping Reddit, I observed a publish from an AI imagery hobbyist who goes by the title “fofr“—pronounced “Foffer,” he advised 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 type of J.R.R. Tolkien. However the handwriting-cloning method he found was now public information.