My Dead Father is “Writing” Me Notes Again
Freeman writes:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/my-dead-father-is-writing-me-notes-again/
Growing up, if I wanted to experiment with something technical, my dad made it happen. We shared dozens of tech adventures together, but those adventures were cut short when he died of cancer in 2013. Thanks to a new AI image generator, it turns out that my dad and I still have one more adventure to go.
Recently, an anonymous AI hobbyist discovered that an image synthesis model called Flux can reproduce someone's handwriting very accurately if specially trained to do so.
[...] I admit that copying someone's handwriting so convincingly could bring dangers. I've been warning for years about an upcoming era where digital media creation and mimicry is completely and effortlessly fluid, but it's still wild to see something that feels like magic work for the first time.
[...] As a daily tech news writer, I keep an eye on the latest innovations in AI image generation. Late last month while browsing Reddit, I noticed a post from an AI imagery hobbyist who goes by the name "fofr"-pronounced "Foffer," he told me, so let's call him that for convenience. Foffer announced that he had replicated J.R.R. Tolkien's handwriting using scans found in archives online.
[...] Foffer's breakthrough was realizing that Flux can be customized using a special technique called "LoRA" (short for "low-rank adaptation") to imitate someone's handwriting in a very realistic way. LoRA is a modular method of fine-tuning Flux to teach it new concepts that weren't in its original training dataset-the initial set of pictures and illustrations its creator used to teach it how to synthesize images.
[...] "I don't want to encourage people to copy other's handwriting, especially signatures," Foffer told me in an interview the day he took the Tolkien model down. But said he would help me attempt to apply his technique to a less famous individual for an article, telling me how I could inexpensively train my own image synthesis model on a cloud AI hosting site called Replicate. "I think you should try it. I think you'll be surprised how fun and easy it is," he said.
[...] My dad was an electronics engineer, and he had a distinctive way of writing in all-caps that was instantly recognizable to me throughout his life. [...] I began the task of assembling a "dad's uppercase" dataset.
[...] using neural networks to model handwriting isn't new. In January 2023, we covered a web app called Calligrapher.ai that can simulate dynamic handwriting styles (based on 2013 research from Alex Graves). A blog post from 2016 written by machine learning scientist Sam Greydanus details another method of creating AI-generated handwriting, and there's a company called Handwrytten that sells robots that write actual letters, with pen on paper, using simulated human handwriting for marketing purposes.
What's new in this instance is that we're using Flux, a free open-weights AI model anyone can download or fine-tune, to absorb and reproduce handwriting styles.
[...] I felt joy to see newly synthesized samples of Dad's handwriting again. They read to me like his written voice, and I can feel the warmth just seeing the letters. I know it's not real and he didn't really write it, so I personally find it fun.
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