ThisPersonDoesNotExist

ThisPersonDoesNotExist

Okay, so this came out in 2019 so is positively ancient in Internet time; but if you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed!

Point your browser to https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and check out a photo of a random person … except that that person doesn’t and hasn’t ever existed!

A neural network called a Generative Adversarial Network generated the face in a fraction of a second. Hit refresh in your browser to generate another image. Amazing? Absolutely! Creepy? Totally.

Generative Adversarial Networks are a really cool idea that surfaced a few years back. In simplistic terms, you have two neural networks (or AIs if you like) pitted against each other. The one network – the generator – is trying to generate pictures of people well enough to fool its adversary AI, and the adversary AI is learning how to detect the difference between the fake people and the real people. The networks are pitted against each other, and together they both learn how to get better and better at their task: the fake generator gets a turn to keep learning and improving until it can generate fakes that the detector can’t distinguish from the real thing, then the detector gets a chance to train and learn until it always detects the fake. Do this turn-swapping routine a few million times, and soon the generator can generate fake faces that are good enough to fool humans like us!

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