I don't want to go all SJW on you guys, amazing work, but can you try to make sure there's an inclusive array of starting faces please? Talking about things like skin tones, thanks!
It's an extremely hard research problem, because darker skin tones account for only about 0.3% of all anime art produced in the world.
We have employed an absolutely exhaustive array of art and data science tricks to give the model the ability to draw darker skin tones, though they are underrepresented. The results that you see today are the culmination of many months of careful tuning!
It's not definitely perfect, but from a data science perspective, this situation can't be rectified until the art world makes a shift.
Personally, I hope that more art representing dark skin tones will be created in the world!
I don't quite understand the need to mandate racial caricaturizations in every modes of communication. I would find it upsetting if every pieces of texts and quotes were prefaced with an "origin" indicator to aid forming prejudices. Why have it in manga?
If you are part of a marginalized group, it is both nice to the individual and productive for societal-level integration if you find yourself represented in media, especially if it's a generator with a promise of "generate anyone".
No one here is mandating shit, GP asked a friendly question in a most respectful manner, which prompted an informative answer from OP even. If such interaction generates such an allergic reaction in you, the problem is not with the grandparent comment.
I really think this integration predominantly means systemic internalization of racism, with side effect of affirmative actions. When ethnicity is expressed with intent, a distinction is made, and distinction is synonymous to discrimination. Or classification, for that matter.
What mandate? It's a product designed to be used by living, breathing people and people tend have various preferences. Do people requesting darker skinned models somehow upset you more than people who request red haired models?
Okay, I backtrack a bit, GP didn't specify that they want an adjustable ethnicity, only skin colors, and I made an assumption that exaggerated ethnic features is the intent.
I can’t understand why the GP comment is flagged. If you can look past all the “culture war” stuff, this is pointing out some of the limits of algorithmic creativity.
It does not do well generating instances with features that are not well represented in the training dataset.
Compare this to human creativity. I suspect that fulfilling GPs request would be almost trivial for a human professional artist.
To be clear this is an amazing achievement, a creative use of the technology, and a positive contribution to the world. Pointing out limitations (i.e. areas with potential for future innovation) does not diminish it.
That's because humans have also seen a lot of human beings with diverse skin tones. If we had only seen anime our whole life it would be much more difficult for us to conceive of also. With more compute, we will eventually be able to make bigger models with more knowledge of the world that will also be able to overcome this.
Anything irrelevant to plot or story building, such as nationality, are usually left unspecified. Readers often project their own identity into characters, and some people seem to find it odd that they do not encounter traits that differ from their own.
Ethnicity is sometimes incorporated, that is, some distinctions would be necessary if there was a documentary manga about a match in an Olympic Games played by teams from multiple parts of the world, and in that case an American players might be given smaller eyes or extra wrinkles in face, or African players might be colored darker than other characters, Chinese players could be drawn with slightly different shapes of chins, etc.
But the default is unspecified or an averaged, most simplified shapes and forms that the author uses in their own cognition.
Well, there is (or rather was) "ganguro" at least, which appeared in mangas an animes occasionally, too. Not sure how many people would be getting offended by that these days, though.
Ganguro is associated with a certain Japanese subculture and aesthetic, and not meant at all to represent darker-skinned races. There are works that feature a more diverse cast, but perhaps the proportion of representation accurately reflects what you would see in Japanese society.
> Ganguro is associated with a certain Japanese subculture and aesthetic, [...]
Yes. What's your point?
> [...] and not meant at all to represent darker-skinned races.
No one ever claimed that. The question to my post was simply where to possibly get data from for "darker skin tones". Ganguro seems like an option because ... well, darker skin tones? Care to elaborate why you bring up "representation of darker skinned races" up in this context?
In the context that they were using skin tones in, (cf. "usually Japanese characters", "go all SJW on you guys"), it's easily inferred that the interest is in more diverse representation of races and not excessively salon-tanned Japanese skin.
... because that was the request of the root comment? And also because Ganguro does not, in fact, represent races with darker skin tones so is a falsely equivalent set of data?
It's funny how people get attached to this topic even when it's just about fictional drawn characters. But yeah, for the sake of data: Just put a color filter on the images, tone the skin down and put them back into the training set. Is that a "falsely equivalent set of data" to represent those groups? Who knows. Probably, if you really want to believe in that. But before we go any deeper into this completely out-of-context racial representation argument, keep in mind that the process I just described is the exact same thing actual artists of said fictional drawn characters use to achieve the results in question.
> process I just described is the exact same thing actual artists of said fictional drawn characters use to achieve the results in question.
If we understand the ancestor comments as asking for more diverse representation, then no, because ganguro and many other anime archetypes and their clothing and accessories are ultimately Japonicentric, in the same way that you might consider angels and demons contrasted against each other post-antiquity Eurocentric.
My opinion on the matter is that it's not necessarily a worthy goal, but there is a more distinct difference to representing people of different races even in anime faces than just skin tone.
In Japanese anime, ethnically Japanese characters are regularly represented with unusual hair and eye colors, to help distinguish them from each-other. Including e.g. purple eyes or blue hair not naturally seen on humans.
Anime has a pretty severe "representation of blackness" problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi2_S6kBgIg is one video discussing this). I'm afraid to imagine what a model trained on that source content would generate.
