A team of researchers at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi (UAE) has developed an AI system capable of mimicking human handwriting and generating text that resembles their own.

The system, called HWT, is developed based on a computer vision transformer, with the ability to understand the context and meaning of data in the system including images of text and words.

“To mimic someone’s handwriting style, AI has to look at the entire text and only then does it begin to understand how the writer connects characters, letters, and spaces between words,” said Fahad Khan, a member of the research team.

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HWT compares the pen with GAN technology and Davis with a prototype (far left). Photo: MBZUAI

The research has been granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for a tool that could help people with injuries write without a pen.

One of the inventors, Rao Muhammad Anwer, an assistant professor of computer vision, told Bloomberg in an interview that the system could also be used to read doctors' notoriously difficult handwriting and even create personalized advertising.

The tool is not yet widely available and can currently generate text in English and some French, but generating handwritten text in Arabic is proving to be a more difficult task.

The inventors note that the tool could be "misused" to fake people's handwriting, so they are "very cautious."

“Handwriting represents a person’s identity, so we are thinking carefully about this before implementing it,” Anwer said in a press release.

“We will have to raise public awareness and develop tools to combat spoofing,” Hisham Cholakkal, assistant professor of computer vision at MBZUAI, told Bloomberg. “It’s like developing an antivirus program for a virus.”

AI is being abused in a variety of ways, such as the AI ​​image generation tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion being used to produce deepfake images of celebrities.

Meanwhile, AI imitating human voices is also a concern. Last September, actor Stephen Fry said that an AI system had copied his voice from the seven-book Harry Potter series, to illegally dub a documentary.

(According to BI)

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