People who never existed, but AI allows you to see them

I have found a fantastically disturbing website, called ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com.

When you click the link, a picture of a human face appears, but as the page’s heading declares,

“This person does not exist!!!”

The faces and the pictures were generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI)!

Every time you reload the website, you see a new image of a different person since the algorithm essentially uses a large image collection to construct portraits of imaginary persons. It uses GAN under the hood, which basically comprises of two neural nets. The first generates an image, and the second tries to determine how realistic it is. GAN training will continue until the neural network generator deceives the neural network judge. The faces generated are imaGANary… 🤣 (sorry for the dad joke..)

It was created by Philip Wang, an Uber software developer, with graphics processor manufacturer Nvidia’s technologies back in 2019. There are some further info on Verge and other sites as well and a good video here.

This is totally impressive, scary and stupid at the same time. Most of the pictures are flawless or maybe have weird backgrounds but the faces tend to be ok. Every now and then though, the generator algorithm creates crazy mistakes but the checking neural net misses the issues. Some examples are

Woman with hole in her head.

Lady with glasses started to be drawn on the left hand side but never created for the other end…🧐

…and some issues with earrings here and there and everywhere 🤪