1705905159
You can also listen to the article as an audio version
Since ancient times, handwriting has been a unique personal style that allows different people’s texts or signatures to be distinguished from one another. The author of the text is identified using the font, handwriting and signature, and graphology is then used to determine the author’s psychological profile.
But all of this may not be true for much longer. A team of scientists from the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi has developed an artificial intelligence tool that can mimic human handwriting based on the analysis of just a few paragraphs. The university announced this in December.
To develop it, the researchers used a Vision Transformer, a type of neural network that can understand the context and meaning of systematic data, such as words in a sentence, reports Business Insider. They even patented their invention with the United States Patent and Trademark Office as a tool that can help people with disabilities or injuries write without writing implements.
“If we want to imitate someone’s writing style, we have to look at the entire text, and only then can we begin to understand how the author connected the characters, how he put the letters together or how he separated the words,” describes the Development of the tool in a press release Fahad Khan, who worked on the project.
But in addition to copying a person’s handwriting style and helping people with disabilities, the tool could also act as a decoder for illegible handwriting. Scientists cite the famous medical “doodles” as an example.
Potential threats
The tool is not yet available to the public as some issues need to be resolved first. Theoretically, it could also be used for various frauds, such as forging manuscripts or signatures. According to the scientists, it is therefore important to raise awareness of the tool and educate the public to avoid the risks. At the same time, stronger security is required. Since it only requires a few paragraphs of sample text, it can mimic almost any handwriting.
“We are very careful about this as there could be misuse.” Handwriting represents a person’s identity, so we think carefully before using it,” commented one of the developers, Rao Muhammad Anwer, in a press release on the public presentation .
To check the quality of their invention, the developers showed the texts he had written and their drafts to a hundred people. The participants were then asked which handwriting they liked best and, above all, whether they could guess which of the samples was written by the artificial intelligence. Not only could participants not tell, they actually liked the AI-written examples better than the human ones.
“We also showed the generated font to people to compare it with a reference model. To our surprise, the result of the generated font was quite good. “They couldn’t distinguish the fake handwriting from the real handwriting and it was very satisfying for us to see such confirmation of the results,” Salman Khan commented on the results.
So far, artificial intelligence has been able to imitate handwriting in English and sometimes also in French. Writing in the researchers’ native language, Arabic, is a major challenge, they say. The complexity lies primarily in the way individual letters in written Arabic are connected to one another. However, in the future, researchers would like to suppress it and add other languages to the AI repertoire.
#Artificial #intelligence #learned #imitate #signature