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bretbernhoft wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 4:08 am In some senses it doesn't really matter if something is "real" or "fake"; there is likely someone (who fully knows what "it is") who is willing to buy it regardless. I mean to say that there are already whole communities of folks who find immeasurable value in digital assets. Sitting here, I wonder what the relationships between (so-called) fake digital assets and cryptocurrencies are?

We present a novel point-based, differentiable neural rendering pipeline for scene refinement and novel view synthesis. The input are an initial estimate of the point cloud and the camera parameters. The output are synthesized images from arbitrary camera poses. The point cloud rendering is performed by a differentiable renderer using multi-resolution one-pixel point rasterization. Spatial gradients of the discrete rasterization are approximated by the novel concept of ghost geometry. After rendering, the neural image pyramid is passed through a deep neural network for shading calculations and hole-filling. A differentiable, physically-based tonemapper then converts the intermediate output to the target image. Since all stages of the pipeline are differentiable, we optimize all of the scene's parameters i.e. camera model, camera pose, point position, point color, environment map, rendering network weights, vignetting, camera response function, per image exposure, and per image white balance. We show that our system is able to synthesize sharper and more consistent novel views than existing approaches because the initial reconstruction is refined during training. The efficient one-pixel point rasterization allows us to use arbitrary camera models and display scenes with well over 100M points in real time.

In 2020, a group of robbers in the United Arab Emirates used deepfake technology to imitate the voice of a bank executive to deceive a manager into handing them over money. The government of the UAE has requested the United States for help in tracing the approximately $400,000 that went into the suspects' accounts.

This hasn't been the first time AI has been used for nefarious purposes. In 2019, criminals deepfaked an executive's voice in an attempt to steal $243,000 according to the Wall Street Journal.

Synthetic media has become synonymous with the aspects of manipulation, particularly in deep fakes (and boy, will we come on to deep fakes). That has largely been down to how the technology has hit the public consciousness, driven by concerns over fake news and the genuine concern that people may use it to manipulate our perceptions of reality.

But synthetic media as a category and array of technologies is much more than just deep fakes. There are interesting, creative applications of synthetic media in popular culture and commercial settings.

There’s also an interesting intersection between synthetic media and digital humans, all of which we’ll unpack below.

What is synthetic media?
Synthetic media is an all-encompassing term for the artificial creation or modification of media by “machines” – particularly programs that rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In other words, it’s media that is produced by technology. For this reason, you might also hear synthetic media called “AI-generated media”.

Some types of synthetic media today include AI-written music, text generation, imagery and video, voice synthesis and more. The field is ever expanding as synthetic media companies aim to disrupt more and more parts of traditional media, making new things easier to create.