Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are indeed a fascinating area of research! They’ve led to impressive results in generating realistic images, and your explanation captures their essence quite well.
In the GAN framework, the generative network (often called the generator) learns to create new data samples (such as images) from random noise. Meanwhile, the adversarial network (the discriminator) aims to distinguish between real data and the generated samples. These two networks engage in a competitive dance, each pushing the other to improve. As you mentioned, this process continues until the generated images become remarkably convincing.
The images you shared, generated by NVIDIA’s GAN, showcase the network’s ability to create realistic-looking faces. While some might still detect subtle artifacts or imperfections, they are indeed impressive. It’s remarkable how GANs can capture intricate details and patterns, even though they don’t explicitly learn from labeled data.
As for recognizing them as fakes, it depends on the context and the viewer’s familiarity with the dataset. For someone who hasn’t seen these specific faces before, they might pass as authentic. However, a keen observer might notice subtle inconsistencies or patterns that give away their synthetic origin.