At Siggraph 2019, AI-aided CG flexed its muscles and slightly stumbled
In reality, I am not a long-haired Asian woman, and when I create virtual avatars of myself, they’re never long-haired, Asian, or female. Yet at this week’s Siggraph 2019 conference in Los Angeles, FaceUnity’s “automatic” cloud AI avatar generator snapped a photo of me and quickly came to some very incorrect conclusions. “It thinks you’re a lady,” one of the booth attendants said, slightly smiling. I walked away from the demo bemused, thinking about how Apple will eventually add the same AI-powered feature to iOS’s Animoji/Memoji generator, but will make it work properly.
This, in a nutshell, is the 2019 state of AI in computer graphics. Lots of developers are finding ways to incorporate AI and machine learning technologies into projects that will be mainstream within the next five years, but you often have to look beyond their currently mixed results — and their least performant examples — to appreciate how important they’ll soon become.