My dead father is “writing” me notes again

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 lower quick when he died of most cancers in 2013. Due to a brand new AI picture generator, it seems that my dad and I nonetheless have another journey to go.

Not too long ago, 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 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 that means behind handwriting itself.

Past that, I am additionally pleased 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 means that was not possible a decade in the past. It has been some time since he died, and I’m not grieving. From my perspective, this can be a celebration of one thing nice about my dad—reviving the distinct means 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 era the place digital media creation and mimicry is totally and effortlessly fluid, however 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 actually, 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 data from the popularity of the messenger.

This fluidity in media creation is completely exemplified by Flux’s strategy to handwriting synthesis. Probably the most attention-grabbing 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 means. A neural community just like the one which drives Flux is a large internet of possibilities and approximations, so the imperfect move 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, resembling indicators, cartoons, billboards, chalkboards, TV photos, and far more.

It is value noting that neither I nor the one who just 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—however it has just lately develop into nearly trivially cheap to take action utilizing both a cloud service or consumer-level {hardware} you probably have the writing samples readily 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 shopping Reddit, I observed a put up from an AI imagery hobbyist who goes by the title “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 obtainable for others to make use of, however he voluntarily took it down two days later when he started to fret about individuals misusing it to create handwriting within the fashion of J.R.R. Tolkien. However the handwriting-cloning method he found was now public data.