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'This Person Does Not Exist' Website Uses AI To Create Realistic Yet Horrifying Faces (inverse.com)

Posted by msmash on from the stranger-things dept.

A website that uses AI -- Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) -- to generate photos of people who do not exist is circulating on social media and forums this week. A news writeup adds: Every time the site is refreshed, a shockingly realistic -- but totally fake --picture of a person's face appears. Uber software engineer Phillip Wang created the page to demonstrate what GANs are capable of, and then posted it to the public Facebook group "Artificial Intelligence & Deep Learning" on Tuesday. The underlying code that made this possible, titled StyleGAN, was written by Nvidia and featured in a paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed. This exact type of neural network has the potential to revolutionize video game and 3D-modeling technology, but, as with almost any kind of technology, it could also be used for more sinister purposes.

5 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. The Technology Is Already Being Used Negatively by dryriver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A friend who lives in a repressive country where over 90% of the media is pro-government propaganda told me that the when he does a reverse image-search of the little "author image" next to the opinion pieces lauding the government's actions, neither Google nor Tineye can find the person online. It seems that the opinion pieces are authored by supposed "journalists" who's face can only be found next to the opinion piece - and nowhere else online. The authors names and their face images are fictional, even though their faces appear to belong to a real person. It seems like this tech was around before Nvidia supposedly "pioneered" it.

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    Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
    1. Re:The Technology Is Already Being Used Negatively by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This actually sounds a bit like the bulk news outlet services which a lot of small newspapers use nowadays - I believe it was covered in an NPR story a few years back. The news items are collected and aggregated overseas, sometimes rewritten slightly to "localize", and then released using a made up "generic white American" name (and sometimes a stock photo) for the byline.

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  2. Not 100% by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not 100% realistic yet. The faces look good, but with the hair and body there are a lot of issues. I pulled up one picture and the face is a significantly lighter tone than the neck/chest area which leads to issue number 2, the woman does not appear to have a neck. The ears are just close enough to realistic to notice they aren't right, and the hair coming down over the body isn't correct either. But the facial features are really good.

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    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  3. Do something useful with it by Comboman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Someone should write a bot to post each new photo to Facebook (along with a randomly generated name) to salt their facial recognition algorithm.

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  4. Horrifying maybe for the wrong reason by FilmedInNoir · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Some of the pics have noticeable artifacts that give the appearance of a severe scar... or possibly gills in some cases.

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    Sig. Sig. Sputnik