AI breaks yet another barrier, can now imitate a person's handwriting
A team of researchers from an Abu Dhabi university have developed an AI technology that can imitate a person’s handwriting style based on a few paragraphs of their written work
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to hog headlines. In a latest development, a team of researchers from an Abu Dhabi university have created AI tools that can imitate a person’s handwriting.
A team of researchers at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi said that the technology it has developed can imitate a person’s handwriting style based on a few paragraphs of their written work. They have used a transformer model to accomplish this, and have been given a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for the AI system.
After generating deepfake videos and voice clones that can deceive most people, AI is now making progress in the area of handwriting that has been the subject of interest for several years.
Whether the new development will be more beneficial than harmful is debatable. While it can help injured people to write without actually picking up a pen, it can also be used to commit forgery. Two of the researchers said that they have to develop tools to fight misuse, and need to create public awareness.
Other uses for the application can be to understand doctors’ handwriting, creating personalised advertising, generating large amounts of artificial data to help other AI models process handwriting, and many more. The team is planning to make their application commercial in the next few months and are hunting for collaborators to make it happen.
The research, however, is still a work-in-progress. While it can write in English and to some extent in French, it is yet to conquer languages like Arabic, said the researchers.
