Seeing shouldn't always be believing

USA - All it takes is a single selfie. From that static image, an algorithm can quickly create a moving, lifelike avatar: a video not recorded, but fabricated from whole cloth by software. With more time, Pinscreen, the Los Angeles start-up behind the technology, believes its renderings will become so accurate they will defy reality.

"You won't be able to tell," said Hao Li, a leading researcher on computer-generated video at USC who founded Pinscreen in 2015. "With further deep-learning advancements, especially on mobile devices, we'll be able to produce completely photoreal avatars in real time." The technology is a triumph of computer science that highlights the gains researchers have made in deep neural networks, complex algorithms that loosely mimic the thinking of the human brain.

Similar breakthroughs in artificial intelligence allowed University of Washington researchers to move President Obama's mouth to match a made-up script and the chipmaker Nvidia to train computers to imagine what roads would look like in different weather.

What used to take a sophisticated Hollywood production company weeks could soon be accomplished in seconds by anyone with a smartphone. Not available for a video chat? Use your lifelike avatar as a stand-in. Want to insert yourself into a virtual reality game? Upload your picture and have the game render your character.

Those are the benign applications.

“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Just what is an Apostle?

Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”

The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!

Read online or contact email to request a copy

Listen to Me, You who know righteousness, You people in whose heart is My Law: …I have put My words in your mouth, I have covered you with the shadow of My hand, That I may plant the heavens, Lay the foundations of the earth, and say to Zion, “you are My people” (Isaiah 51:7,16)