I could see this being used in the same way that auto-tune type effects are added to singers voices. The editing of music videos could include a tool like this to make sure all of the dancers behind the main one are moving just right.

And just like auto-tuned voices, it will come off as janky and fake.

Oh man, the first company to put this in a mobile app is going to blow up.

(I guess it might take a few years for the performance to get there)

Funnily enough, I think this technology would be better demoed by people doing more natural motions like walking around and doing basic gestures, or dancing in a style that is more fluid. This type of dancing is made to look intentionally "unnatural" (ie: you rarely see people moving like this in your daily life), which makes it a bit difficult to tell how much of the strangeness/unanny-ness comes from the dancing style vs imprecision in the algorithm.

Nice save way not to say "New Deeper Fakes - now full body!". This is hardly just about dancing. This can be used to create anyone doing anything. The quality will improve, far beyond the quality levels of the hands now and the other interpolated body parts far past the quality necessary for games.

Very impressive!

I'm a bit disappointed though that they didn't also include results for a synthetic source video with "impossible" poses (e.g. joints bending backwards, stretching, separating from the body or performing full rotations). That would have been pretty interesting (though perhaps a bit unsettling) to see.

I loved watching the movements in the "Detected Pose" corner. I felt like I could see the forms of the dance more clearly. I wonder if ML could learn aesthetically pleasing dance forms, then perhaps we could get some generative choreography!

The title seems poorly worded.

Using AI to transform anyone into a professional dancer might include using AI to process live video (webcam) of someone dancing and then giving them some feedback for improvement. In a word: coaching.

However this is using AI to produce composite videos of people dancing.

So this is a cool demo --and it has applications in cinema, MVs, etc. But, this is being presented as something which could allow Jane Q User to portray herself as an accomplished dancer --just transfer a style onto herself.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think if we take this idea and walk with it, it has the potential to trivialize actual accomplishment. Maybe I'm overthinking it.

So things can AI do now

- Mimic a target's body motions (this link)

- Mimic a target's facial expressions (deepfakes)

- Mimic a target's voice (lyrebird AI, etc)

related video, digital animation puppeteering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiOByO8J7xg&t=2s&list=LLI462...

Its not perfect by any means, but we're seeing a new age of CGI. Once perfected, I wonder how the entertainment industry will change as a result (Faster rendering times, less time to make scenes, puppeteering, not needing expensive famous actors or stunt doubles, digital identity copyrights, etc)

Its a bungee jump into uncanny valley: exciting, but how many times would you pay, and who has more fun? you, or your friends watching?

As a dancer & instructor of over 18 years, I think this technology is fascinating. I actually think it would be most effective as a teaching tool for my students. Often times, since the kids are so focused on the physicality of the steps, I find a disconnect between the visual and physical experience as they train, i.e. the kids don't realize that the steps/movements they make are in attempt to create visual shapes and lines. They run around the studio 'feeling themselves' (precious), but at the end of the year on-stage, the choreography suffers from this visual connection.

I appreciate that the detected poses and motions create clear pictures for what different parts of the body are doing. Particularly for ballet, if I had access to this technology (in a way that was user friendly), I'd love to see the difference between ballet styles (Vaganova, Cechetti, ABT, ect). I think it would be much clearer from a students' perspective, to see the stylistic difference in lines, shapes and movement.

This AI reminds me of Happy Feet, where they took Savion Glover's movement and choreography and applied it to the animation penguin. It doesn't seem too far-fetched. And lastly, for those who say this seems unnatural--dancing is unnatural to the body, hence the training and years put into it. So having an AI applied to it will only make it look more unnatural.

Artistically, this can be debated (as it has been), but in search for 'real life application,' I'd love to get my hands on this as a teaching tool.

sorry for the long post--this is my first time on this site--my boyfriend sent this to me & warned me that if i blabbed too long, this post would not be successful.

As many other comments have said, the title is misleading; the key quotation is:

"(...) allows anyone to portray themselves as a world-class ballerina (...)"

Moreover, after AlphaGO took away Go from us, I started to wonder "what is left" for humans, and I believe that we are centuries away to have machines that achieve world class dancing level. My reasoning is than in things like Go, image or speech recognition, it is easier to "encode" the information for the ML to actually learn. On the other hand, encoding the movements of professional dancers is already quite difficult. Consider for example in the video linked here, the whole human body is mapped into ~20 points. Sure, this may be enough to portray someone as a dancer. But good luck making a dancing robot.

So, maybe I quit my programming career to become a dancer, it is less likely to be a job that the machines will take away ;-)

edit: grammar

AI can make anyone appear to be a professional dancer. There is a difference between what is real and what is fake.

Here's an unpopular opinion: such applications aren't going to trivialize art.

Like competitive sports, art is all about display of human ability under constraints. This is why even in the age of photographs, we still value hand-painted canvases. Such techniques are simply going to make people more discerning between real effort v/s automated means of generating the same outcome.

Rather than thinking AI-assisted style transfers are the end of art, we should think that these are new tools for artists to do even more interesting stuff. See this upcoming tool for example: https://runwayml.com/

I'm sure that this will, at no point, be used for evil.

Need to send this to theresa may

We should think of something like a blockchain to mark all this sh*t as fake though, because in five years time there will be no way to distinguish reality from invention and we will all be under constant blackmail from malicious agents and rogue governments showing up at our door with whatever made-up accusation they want.

Oh boy, those hands at 0:14 are a no for me.

This is incredible!

I wonder if seeing yourself dance like this might speed up learning to actually dance like this...

I'm itching to make this. Would this be a good intro ML project for a solid software engineer (with a decently strong math background) or would it likely be far over my head? Seems like reverse engineering it from the paper would be tough, but maybe doable :p

No, not "transform into". It's "make look like, in a video".

I mean, who cares what you look like in some video? When you actually meet people, they'll know that it's bullshit.

Now, if you could manage it in meatspace, that would be cool!

Anyone want to get rich developing this for android /w me? haha

Does this mean that we can manipulate videos programmatically in the future? I don't see why not. Maybe we'll see games that are literally undistinguishable from reality.

My kids would pay any amount of my money to play this as a game.

Some time ago there was a submission saying that the adult industry uses similar algorithms to put arbitrary faces on videos of actors.

The title is clickbait...It doesn't turn anyone into a better dancer. It's just about CGI stuff. A kind of future of emoji.

What is going here, the world is looking more and more like a movie! Apocalypse soon?

Massively underwhelming read from the headline. This is basically just deepfakes for dancing. When machine learning can actually teach someone how to dance, then we’ll have something interesting on our hands.

AI couldn't be used for critical task, in which mistakes are not allowed at all. What's its real use cases ?

Very impressive!

Looks as fake as dinosaurs in 1993.

> Using NVIDIA TITAN Xp and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs, with the cuDNN-accelerated PyTorch deep learning framework for both training and inference

> the team based their algorithm on the pix2pixHD architecture developed by NVIDIA researchers

Is it me, or is NVIDIA trying very hard to take credit for this UC Berkeley paper? (they're almost taking credit for Pytorch as well). Sure, this kind of work wouldn't be possible without their hardware, but in that case Intel could probably take credit for most of science in the last few decades.

It looks impressive, I just don't understand why computer games don't use these techniques to feature realistic human bodies/faces.

This issue was already solved with invention of booze and soft drugs.