Latent Compass: Creation by Navigation
Sarah Schwettmann, Hendrik Strobelt, Mauro Martino

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel AI-driven method for discovering perceptually meaningful directions in GAN latent space, enabling real-time, interpretable image manipulation grounded in human perception and creativity.
Contribution
It proposes an interactive, unsupervised approach that captures human-perceived features in GAN latent space for personalized and generalizable image creation.
Findings
Effective real-time identification of perceptual directions
Enhanced interpretability of image translations
Broader exploration of human-like feature representations
Abstract
In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is…
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Taxonomy
TopicsArtificial Intelligence in Games · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Natural Language Processing Techniques
