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This Sneaker Does Not Exist

161 points| StanvdVossen | 4 years ago |thissneakerdoesnotexist.com | reply

68 comments

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[+] shmatt|4 years ago|reply
I did something similar in a big fashion company in the past

They had a non-utilized collection of tens of thousands of tagged clothing photos going back to the 80s. I Used DCGAN to generate images of new clothing, then model arithmetic to request specific ("sparkly winter dress") pieces. It was pretty amazing to see the strength with existing photos

The higher ups stared, blinked a few times, and just muttered they don't get it

I have no doubt this is in the future of fashion design in the next 20 years. I just hope those images don't get lost when the company inevitably shuts down

[+] toper-centage|4 years ago|reply
Fashion is so diverse that you can hardly ever create something that looks distinctively new. Me with these shoes. They either look weird or regular, and the regular probably exist in a very similar style.
[+] angarg12|4 years ago|reply
I work with a shoemaker and I've commissioned a few bespoke sneakers (trainers as we call them here) in the past. He comes up with new designs from scratch, and I made suggestions and ask for changes based on my taste.

Usually I browse online shops for inspiration, but I'm curious about whether this service can produce original designs sensible enough to, at least, be the base of a new shoe.

[+] danzeeeman|4 years ago|reply
Yeah the process is being used to generate sneakers well before this guy even started scraping the net. We had our first prototype in production last winter and just finished our second two. http://aire-gan.com
[+] jstx1|4 years ago|reply
I get that the title is in the theme of this-x-does-not-exist but I don't think it's true in this case. Many of these look like existing models.

The amount of variation in sneakers is limited so when you have 50k training images you end up copying some of them with little to no change because if you deviate too much you end with something that doesn't pass as a sneaker at all.

[+] fxtentacle|4 years ago|reply
In most cases, GAN produces a random mixture of features extracted from real photos. That's also why you can tempt GitHub Copilot to regurgitate Carmack's swearing comment.
[+] bloopernova|4 years ago|reply
Somewhat related:

https://imgflip.com/ai-meme

"This meme does not exist". Definitely good for a few minutes messing around while you have your morning coffee/tea/beverage of personal choice.

[+] ASalazarMX|4 years ago|reply
I found it frustrating, since most texts make no sense. You can force yourself to imagine a situation where they make sense, but then it becomes tiring.

I guess it's just lightly trained with the captions users have submitted for each image. It's a random meme generator that didn't even need AI if this was the intended end product.

Maybe it being crappy is actually the joke and I'm missing it.

[+] citizenpaul|4 years ago|reply
I decided i have no motivation or life today so I tried them all.

Drake Meme - Doesn't Work

Fry - Works well

American Choppers - broken

Distracted Boyfriend - Really Works well often funny.

Women yelling at cat - Works well

Skeptical Third world - Hit or miss can be funny

Batman Slap - Works pretty well

Disaster Girl - Works well often funny.

That Would be great - Works very well but not funny.

Change my mind - Totally broken

Interesting Man - Works but not usually funny

Epic handshake - Usually nonsense

Exit ramp - 50/50 broken funny

pikachu - works but not funny

Grandma internet - works but not funny

One Simply - Hit or miss on funny but works

Leonardo Cheers - Broken

Trump Signs - Broken

Mocking Spongebob - Broken

Doge - Broken

Yoda - Nonsense and broken

Expanding Brain - Mostly broken

Seagul - Broken

Tom - Broken

Escaping ballon - 50/50 broken funny

The Rock - 50/50 broken funny

Spongebob dont - often funny

Boardroom - broken

Is this a pigeon - often nonsensically funny.

Evil kermit - broken

Third world success kid - Works sometimes funny

Uno Draw - Works not funny

Yall got any - kinda works but not funny

Ancient aliens - works well often funny

Scroll of truth - works sometimes funny

killed hannible - all over the place

Waiting skelly - Mostly works not funny

Hide the pain - Sort of works can be really funny when it does

Marked safe - works not funny

X everywhere - half broken can be funny

oprah - mostly broken

sad spongebob - works but not funny

Thinking - all over the place mostly nonsense but can be funny

Tuxedo poo - all over the place can be funny

hard to swallow pill - works can be funny.

[+] ellisv|4 years ago|reply
A few years ago, I interviewed at StockX, and the team was working on exactly this – using GANs to generate pictures of shoes. Interesting to see essentially the same thing here a few years later.
[+] daniel_reetz|4 years ago|reply
Always interesting to see just how far ahead you/some project was - or wasn't.
[+] soulmerge|4 years ago|reply
Wow, I think this would be pretty useful as a shopping guide in an online shop: Let the user pick a few models they like and render more items based on the chosen ones. Present actual sneakers you have in stock at the last step.
[+] jstx1|4 years ago|reply
Maybe I'm not getting it. What's the benefit of showing people the imaginary sneakers? Why not show them what they can actually buy?
[+] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
(deep sarcasm)

Yeah, I love it when stores lure me in with products that I want, and then only have products that I don't want. I never rage-quit the store when that happens; I only ever buy dregs that they have in stock. I would love spending hours at a store browsing imaginary products that I can't buy; engagement is a perfect metric to predict profitability and the world needs a lot more than that.

All that said... if you change the contract a bit, it could work. Kinda like groupon, but people can browse AI-generated shoes and the most popular ones enter a tournament, and the winning design gets made for purchase. That could be pretty cool.

[+] StanvdVossen|4 years ago|reply
That's definitely a cool idea! I might ask around different webshops to see if they're interested in something like this.
[+] StanvdVossen|4 years ago|reply
Thank you for all your support, guys! I was not expecting this much traffic. I am currently in the process of moving my site to a better server.

While this is in progress, only the images cached by Cloudflare can be loaded. This means that the editor for most shoes will not work. I apologize for the inconvenience!

[+] thih9|4 years ago|reply
The page doesn’t load for me. I couldn’t find any related page or repository.

I assume this is similar to “this person does not exist” [1]. Other than that, does anyone have more context?

[1]: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

[+] makeitdouble|4 years ago|reply
Site is dead as of now, but looking at the renders [0] they all look like viable designs, and pretty close to actual sneakers.

I don't know if it's a testament to makers' creativity, as tbh there are way wilder sneaker designs released as actual products by Nike or Puma, or the limits set on the generating algorithms to stay within mainstream designs.

[0] StatFallacieSuk's archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20211011073927/https://thissneak...

[+] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
This could change the game for sneaker marketing, and fashion in general. I'd be really interested in this for A-B testing mens sportswear.
[+] danzeeeman|4 years ago|reply
[+] StanvdVossen|4 years ago|reply
I have seen your project. However, I think claiming "first" is disingenuous. There are many projects like ours that date back at least 3 years. We just happen to undertake these projects at a time when algorithms are better and results are palatable.
[+] globular-toast|4 years ago|reply
Even though these are just shoes, there is something really freaky about images generated in this way. Makes me feel really uneasy.
[+] mosselman|4 years ago|reply
There are some very nice designs in there. I bet you could start a legit brand or 5 with some of these in the catalog.
[+] prawn|4 years ago|reply
Generate 1,000 designs. Run them through a hot-or-not or a-vs-b competition. Make the winning sneakers into actual products.
[+] mejutoco|4 years ago|reply
Funny how things work. About 6 months ago I joked about doing exactly this. Kudos for actually making it!
[+] m463|4 years ago|reply
This seems sort of like trying to buy shoes/clothing on amazon right now.

The ratio of odd-made-up-word brands to "normal"/recognizable brands is going way up.

[+] cinntaile|4 years ago|reply
Unlike real sneakers, not one of these look like sneakers that I'd buy though. They look good but there's something off about them.
[+] LegitShady|4 years ago|reply
who knew we would replace the shoe designers with automation before we replaced the sweatshops that produce them with automation.
[+] daniel_reetz|4 years ago|reply
This is actually very prescient. In many ways it is much easier to replace artists than labor, contrary to the current narrative.

A simple example in visual effects are "artist guided tools". Instead of having a team of artists place and guide every virtual hair, you have a single artist draw a curve for the hair to follow, and the computer figures out the rest. There are dozens of examples like this in the world right now.

[+] 1001101|4 years ago|reply
Looking at some of the output... I think I'll stick with Tinker Hatfield and Sergio Lozano.

Also, New Balance 574s definitely exist.

[+] senectus1|4 years ago|reply
nor does the website apparently.
[+] mouzogu|4 years ago|reply
maybe i'm oversimplifying. i had the same thought about the "thispersondoesnotexist" site...but are these not just composites of things that do exist?

or maybe that's the point.

[+] the8472|4 years ago|reply
They are "just composites" in the sense that the NN learns to decompose an image into multidimensional concepts both local and global (the latent space) and then assemble new images from anywhere in that space even at points that weren't in the training set. Of course if the training set is small then it'll overfit to mostly reproduce the inputs.

https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/

[+] StanvdVossen|4 years ago|reply
You’re somewhat right. The machine learning algorithm tries to replicate the general patterns on the images it’s trained on (so in this case, images of a lot of sneakers). If the algorithm is trained on enough images, it should, to an extent, learn to generalize and “understand” what a sneaker should look like and generate new ones rather than copying images. In my case, there is definitely some memorization going on, based on some shoes looking suspiciously similar to existing shoes, but there is also definitely some design going on not copied from other sneakers.

But it builds the images “pixel by pixel” rather than e.g. taking the sole of one shoe with the upper of another if that’s what you’re asking.