
This person does not exist - angrygoat
https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/
======
RodgerTheGreat
It has been interesting to see images clearly generated by this service (same
artefacts, same resolution) start to flood online dating apps and social media
profiles. Previously, fake accounts tended to use photos which could be
reverse-image-searched to detect them.

Luckily, it doesn't seem that this approach can be sensibly extended to
generate entire scenes, or multiple entire-body photos from different angles.
Believability breaks down tremendously in less constrained datasets- see
[https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com](https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com) for
example.

~~~
poizan42
> see
> [https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com](https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com)
> for example.

That site is straight up nightmare fuel:

[https://i.imgur.com/0lg9eNK.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0lg9eNK.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/AL96Pvv.png](https://i.imgur.com/AL96Pvv.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/6s91BaD.png](https://i.imgur.com/6s91BaD.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/NK8J35b.png](https://i.imgur.com/NK8J35b.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/4lEdPOH.png](https://i.imgur.com/4lEdPOH.png)

~~~
trehalose
The first five or six images that site gave me, I never would have guessed.
One or two, completely perfect to my eye. One or two had maybe weird poses,
but underneath enough fur that I honestly could never tell from a real cat
making weird poses, as cats do. One or two I could see a minor clearly digital
artifact that would give it away if I knew to question it, but I wouldn't have
picked up on otherwise. Then the site gave me abstract art.

Funnily enough, your "nightmare fuel" screenshots mostly don't look that
nightmarish to me... I might mistake some of them for real cats at a passing
glance. (Not the first one; that one looks like a root vegetable.) I probably
shouldn't get a job as a cat inspector.

EDIT: Ok this is one of the most horrific things I've seen this year.
[https://ibb.co/Np6KTYq](https://ibb.co/Np6KTYq)

~~~
trehalose
and another: [https://ibb.co/5n8FRN1](https://ibb.co/5n8FRN1)

------
ackshually
There was a pic of an older guy, but what was unsettling was the woman peeking
over his shoulder; like a friend or a family member, leaning into the photo.

Her eyes were melting into black and white streaks curling down over her
sagging cheeks; her smile was perfectly white, and just a little too long.

I refreshed on instinct, and haven't seen anything like it since.

~~~
hnuser123456
[https://i.imgur.com/RmSEnaT.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/RmSEnaT.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/RhROFSf.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/RhROFSf.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/NTC2ZiN.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/NTC2ZiN.jpg)

~~~
ainiriand
The horror.

~~~
Izmaki
This one is sure to haunt me:
[https://imgur.com/a/lGsRX3n](https://imgur.com/a/lGsRX3n)

~~~
ainiriand
Oh Jesus, it is like one of those Cronenberg movies.

~~~
tachyonbeam
You have to imagine some strong AI in 2030, video chatting with people using
fake human avatars, and people can sometimes tell because there's weird
fleshly artifacts moving in the background.

~~~
twic
That's no weird fleshy artifact moving in the background, that's my wife!

------
angrygoat
Here’s the Guardian article which linked the site:
[https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/feb/07/ai-in-the-
ad...](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/feb/07/ai-in-the-adult-
industry-porn-may-soon-feature-people-who-dont-exist)

To my mind there is a massive need for us in the software world to pause and
think about the ethics of all of this. Engineers more broadly have well
developed ethical codes, we should too.

~~~
umvi
So are you saying software developers should have to take the equivalent of a
Bar exam in order to practice software development in a given state? That way
ethical code violations have teeth because you can be debarred.

As of now anyone and their dog can practice software development and I'm not
sure what a nebulous "ethical code" would imply for them.

~~~
Balgair
Probably something more like a PE. From the NSPE website a PE entails:

"To become licensed, engineers must complete a four-year college degree, work
under a Professional Engineer for at least four years, pass two intensive
competency exams and earn a license from their state's licensure board. Then,
to retain their licenses, PEs must continually maintain and improve their
skills throughout their careers."

Most PEs that I have worked with are _very_ diligent. You don't get yahoos
going that far. Generally, they are top-notch engineers. Think '10X'
engineers, but for oil wells and churches. I mean, look at any large structure
on Wikipedia, most of the time you'll find the engineer's name in the side
placard, not just the firm's name. PEs are serious, dedicated, and smart
people. I mean, their stamp is on those documents and they go to jail when the
bridge fails.

So, for software, if you have an exam of the PE's caliber, you essentially
guarantee '10X' engineers. The workforce is more highly paid, yes, but it is
of a much higher quality. Bugs get solved faster, stand-ups don't last 30
minutes, the wiki is updated by everyone, etc. Employers _know_ that their
candidates really are good stuff, less whiteboards or take-homes are needed.
Also, possibly when something messes up, the engineer is the one responsible,
not the company. So offloading the insurance to the employees is not the worst
thing for a company.

Honestly, it would not be a bad system and I think would be a much calmer and
better one.

~~~
TomVDB
Being smart enough to earn the title of PE and agreeing to being personally
responsible for bugs in a large body of code is IMO a contradiction.

------
nineteen999
I was messing with the demo of Character Creator 3 the other week:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnviGWO0wbU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnviGWO0wbU)

It has a "machine learning" based projection mode where you can project a
single photo of a face on the head of a character mesh and it will create
somewhat believable set of 3D features from the photograph on the model. It
was fun to take a couple of the generated faces from this site and apply them
to the models.

I imagine you could do a lot with just those two things if you had the talent
of the artist in the video I posted above. You could create fully rigged and
clothed characters for games in a fraction of the time it would take to make
them entirely from scratch, and for much less expense and cleanup (I would
have thought) than full body scanning.

~~~
thomashusa
Wow! Imagine allowing people to upload their profile picture in and RPG and
suddenly their character actually looks like them. Imagine playing online with
your friends and all of their characters look just like them.

Really Cool! But also slightly weird.

------
tomrod
So, the specific person may not exist, but likely someone very, very similar
in appearance does.

I've come across people in life that I would have sworn were twins. I'm
curious how combinatorically low the number of facial features need to be
before people resemble one another.

~~~
BlameKaneda
Photographer Francois Brunelle has a photo series on people who look like they
could be twins/related but aren't. Genetics is an odd thing.

[https://www.chasejarvis.com/blog/me-myself-and-i-francois-
br...](https://www.chasejarvis.com/blog/me-myself-and-i-francois-brunelle-and-
his-doppelganger-project-find-your-look-alike/)

~~~
rednerrus
The crazy part about this is how little similarity it takes to fool us.

------
ijpsud
You can play with the code[0] for this really easy if you've got a Nvidia GPU
with nvidia-docker[1] installed:

    
    
      docker run --gpus all -it anibali/pytorch:cuda-10.1 bash
      # copy images to container with `docker cp`
      pip install stylegan2_pytorch
      stylegan2_pytorch --data ./images
    

[0]
[https://github.com/lucidrains/stylegan2-pytorch](https://github.com/lucidrains/stylegan2-pytorch)

[1] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-
docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker)

------
jonplackett
I have a question -

When generating a new person (or whatever it is that does not exist) can you
know that it isn’t like any of the images that went into the training data
set?

How likely is it for it to actually exist after all?

~~~
lsb
The model has 18x512 parameters, and all 9000 parameters are 32-bit floats.

Even assuming only 16 bits of randomness for each parameter (to keep them
small enough, so you don't get too wild, because the center of 0 is a pretty
homogenized face), 16^9000 is a lot of permuations of faces.

They will, of course, borrow from all of the 70k faces on Flickr that power
StyleGAN, in varying degrees.

~~~
steerablesafe
> Even assuming only 16 bits of randomness for each parameter

Well, this is the question. How do you know that you can make that assumption?
Also even though you have ~9000 parameters they could be highly dependent.

------
credit_guy
Now try this:

[http://whichfaceisreal.com/](http://whichfaceisreal.com/)

~~~
codesternews
Check the background :D

~~~
alephnil
In addition to the background, if you can see earrings, that is usually a
giveaway. The generated faces seems to always have different earrings in each
ear. Also glasses disappear into the skin, and ears are often different on
each side and/or distorted.

~~~
mynameisfiber
It seems the model often doesn't do exactly round pupils either.

------
beefield
Now, the next obvious question is, how do you pick one of these non-existing
persons and generate images of him/her doing different things in different
places? (Or, of course, real persons. Is there a service where I can upload my
photo and it starts to generate images of me doing random - or not so random -
things?)

~~~
gwern
You can reverse-engineer faces into the original random seed/embedding, and
then tweak the embedding to 'edit' the face. (There are a bunch of tools and
Colab notebooks for that, but the best tool is definitely Artbreeder, which
does a lot of other GAN models too:
[https://artbreeder.com/](https://artbreeder.com/) )

However, since the model only does faces centered in an image, you're
restricted to different headshots: make them smile or frown, or wearing
sunglasses, or different hair color, or animate lip flaps, yes, but not 'doing
different things in different places', unless you can figure out some way to
insert a headshot into a bigger photo.

------
merricksb
Originally submitted just on 12 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280)

(872 points, 242 comments)

~~~
dtakuma
Seems like it has been vastly improved since then [1].

The results are much better than when originally posted in HN.

[1] - [https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958)

------
shrubble
I remember the site hotornot.com ; will there be another one, BotOrNot.com ?

~~~
dlgeek
[http://whichfaceisreal.com/](http://whichfaceisreal.com/)

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
What's the current state of the art on controllable GANs? Like if you wanted
to build a thispersondoesnotexist but with the ability to control e.g. gender,
smile, sunglasses, ethnicity?

~~~
gwern
I believe S1/S2 still are effectively SOTA for static face image editing.
(Note that S2 added a projector and has better latent spaces than S1; see the
paper.) You can play around with them at
[https://artbreeder.com/browse](https://artbreeder.com/browse) among other
ways.

------
fit2rule
An artist friend of mine is using this technology in an interesting way ..
she's drawing regular street portraits of people she meets, and then using
that as the seed to generate new pictures of people who do not exist.

It has produced some extraordinarily disturbing art, especially for those of
us who were her subjects. Some of the images are so wild and out there, it
really is an adventure into ones own psyche. I see so much in the generated
images that creates an intense emotional response, and its very difficult to
differentiate between the lines of the artist and the lines of the code, at
least in a way that is easily discernible. Her art as the seed definitely
amplifies things - the emotions of eyes, the despair of cheeks and lips - in a
way that the generative programming enhances, 1000x ..

Very interesting stuff, and I'm looking forward to her exhibit of this work -
especially the live demonstrations.

~~~
mkl
Does she have any online, on DeviantArt or Instagram or something?

------
Angostura
I'm intrigued about the possibility of using these as stock photos - it dies
away with the need for model permissions (or does it?). Presumably the
copyright on the image resides with the person who ... programmed the neural
net? Trained the neural net? Is running the server?

~~~
Someone
I would guess the one picking the photos and training parameters would have
the largest part of the copyright. Whether courts will decide others have some
rights to is TBD.

The persons whose images the net was trained with also might have, certainly
if the network was trained with only a few images.

~~~
mcv
How does copyright work when you have no idea the photo even exists? Are these
photos dynamically generated on the fly when a page is loaded? Because if so,
then the visitor is the only person to have seen that particular photo, and
there'd be no way for any copyright owner to even know they might hold the
copyright over that particular photo.

------
lsb
StyleGAN (v2, which is this, and v1 before it) is spectacularly high quality.

Even more interestingly, you can interpolate between faces very smoothly. (For
instance, I was able to give some face off the street a drag makeover, by
interpolating that face plus or minus the face of a drag queen minus that
performer's face out of drag: [https://leebutterman.com/assets/lsb5-plus-
trixie-minus-brian...](https://leebutterman.com/assets/lsb5-plus-trixie-minus-
brian.mp4) )

But it can be tricky to encode faces if they look out of the ordinary, where
"ordinary" is the 70k faces on Flickr that trained StyleGAN.

------
speedgoose
This has improved so much since the last time I checked it.

It's interesting to see so high quality on image generation using neural
networks, while text generation using gpt2, which seems a lot easier at first,
is glorified nonsense.

~~~
tyingq
Is part of it deliberate avoidance of women with both ears + earrings showing?
That was one of the tells before...one earring or a mismatched pair. Now the
women mostly seem to be in poses where you can only see one ear, or no ears
(hair covering them).

There is, this time, much less craziness with hair sprouting from the wrong
places.

~~~
not2b
Since they are using an adversarial training method, perhaps the NN that is
voting "thumbs down" could learn that mismatched jewelry means "fake".

------
OscarCunningham
I noticed there are very few black people and none with very dark skin. But
there are lots of people of many other ethnicities. Was dark skin avoided
because it's inherently harder for the algorithm?

~~~
goodside
The training data contains examples of very dark skin:
[https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset/blob/master/ffhq-
teas...](https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset/blob/master/ffhq-teaser.png)

~~~
OscarCunningham
Interesting. I just refreshed the site 100 times to get a large sample size
and the darkest skinned image it produced was this girl
([https://i.imgur.com/ggJIG94.png](https://i.imgur.com/ggJIG94.png)). Her skin
is much lighter than many of the people in that sample of the training data.

Assuming that that sample is representative of all the training data, it must
be that the algorithm is 'choosing' not to produce images of dark skinned
people. Perhaps because it isn't very good at them and 'knows' this? I wonder
if there are other features it's deliberately avoiding?

~~~
iamnothere
> Assuming that that sample is representative of all the training data, it
> must be that the algorithm is 'choosing' not to produce images of dark
> skinned people. Perhaps because it isn't very good at them and 'knows' this?
> I wonder if there are other features it's deliberately avoiding?

An algorithm would not have this kind of insight. (This is just a GAN trained
on face data.) To say that an algorithm like this is "deliberately" doing
anything is a misunderstanding.

Most generators like this that I've seen, like GPT-2, require you to provide a
"seed" of some sort, such as a sentence fragment. They then build off of this
seed. I don't know if this is implemented that way, but if so, perhaps the
developer provided a set of seed data that leads to this result. There may
also be a sort of "averaging" involved (see another commenter's note about the
women having similar features), and depending on both the training data and
the seed, this may result in a preference towards certain features.

Edit: it's StyleGAN.

------
mmahemoff
Meet the social media pundits for the next presidential election.

------
thdrdt
What is the likelihood that the generated person does exist?

I got the feeling this could turn out the same as people using fake email
addresses to later discover that the domain in fact exists (that's why you
should always use example.com).

~~~
mmahemoff
Good question. I would guess it's very low if we're talking exact match. It
would have to match N features. There's effectively an infinite number of
combinations, many more than the 8 billion people curently living.

In reality, there are already real-world doppelgangers, where a typical
observer would confuse two (unrelated) individuals. I'm guessing that could
happen with a synthetic image too, but it's probably not any worse than a
real-world matching error. (The bigger concern is the related one of
deepfakes, which don't need any kind of synthesis, they just act directly on
the real person's image.)

------
robga
My humble entry into the this x does not exist pantheon:

[https://thisbutterflydoesnotexist.com/](https://thisbutterflydoesnotexist.com/)

------
skat20phys
What's really amazing to me is the rendering quality, if that's the right word
for it, the resolution. This seems different to me than the "structural
realism" in the sense of how plausible the face is in it being representative.
Not sure if there are terms for this but it's amazing to me how realistic
things like skin texture are independent of "higher level" features.

------
ogre_magi
I use this to generate faces for NPCs in my TTRPGs.

------
achow
Ask HN - Any equivalent - 'This Voice Does Not Exist'?

It would be awesome to have that for a project that I'm thinking of.

------
dr_j_
I wonder could the generated faces now be used to actually do further
training? Even from scratch for other, similar GANs? Doing so might remove any
privacy concerns about real world data being used to train these things (going
forward)

------
thepete2
They don't let you download the image unless you have the right user agent.
How impolite of them.

------
bagacrap
I looked at about 50 faces trying to find one with a strong jawline or hard
cheekbones. Although the features and hair are very realistic, the algorithm
does seem to stray away from distinctive features. The women especially have
uniformly round and soft faces.

------
tommaho
I can't spot the fake human faces on mobile, but man some of those cats are
nightmare fuel!

------
sub7
Makes me so happy I took "Computers, Ethics and Social Responsibility" in
college.

These algorithms are tools and at their worst they are powerful weapons - much
more dangerous than some nuclear bomb that wipes out a few hundred square
miles.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
It's improved.

I used to be able to tell the fakes by the ears, but that seems to have been
fixed.

~~~
TremendousJudge
And the teeth! It was common for the teeth to be uneven.

They are still a little bit weird but I remember it being much worse

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I am seeing some very slight issue, where the bottom of a top tooth is close
to the lower lip.

------
dep_b
The background, clothing and especially other people in the image are still a
dead giveaway that it's not a real person. It's kind of weird how the
algorithm borks something relatively simple as the texture of clothing.

~~~
worldsayshi
Yeah, you'd think that some GAN scheme would be able to weed that out?

~~~
dep_b
I don't know but I imagine somebody might want to generate an algorithm that
puts random clothes on people. There's so much money going on in the fashion
industry and beautifying. If you can see how a new shirt fits on an existing
person you can also fit a shirt on a fake person right?

------
nautilus12
I just realized the potential this has for ruining dating apps by filling up
the majority of people on the program with fake generated people that just
waste enough of the participants time that they never get anywhere.

------
MichaMeier
Some people generated there seem oddly familiar. Too bad, I am not good with
remembering names or I would frequently go: "oh that is <xyz> from <abc.inc>.
How did his/her picture end up here?"

------
teddyuk
It would be really funny if someone managed to use someone’s phone camera to
take a photo and make it look like the site was showing their own face.

------
kmeade
This gynoid was damaged in the vat.

[https://i.imgur.com/BMoGUVo.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BMoGUVo.jpg)

------
teilo
Why is it that the eyes are often slightly off on so many of these? Many are
fine, but the majority seem to have a slightly lazy eye.

------
tartoran
I noticed that some people have some kinf of skin cancer blip or some other
weird anomaly. Is the algo not able to filter those out?

------
clSTophEjUdRanu
I've seen this.

It would be neat to randomly generate faces until it generates a
"doppelganger" of yourself.

------
kstenerud
I wouldn't be surprised if someone soon comes up with a porn generator based
on this tech.

------
fctorial
This person does not exist _in the training database_.

Imagine seeing your lookalike in here.

~~~
codegladiator
At what point can one say the lookalike is actually one's image ?

------
boublepop
Om my book “x doesn’t exist” demonstrations are absolutely worthless if they
don’t as a minimum show at least one “closest” member of the training set.

You could set up a script that just randomly picked one out of 50 images of my
closest family and no one would know the difference from going to it.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
Except for the occasional horrible creepy deformed things seen sometimes... Or
is that your family too?

~~~
boublepop
The point is that you aren’t demonstrating the implied value in the generated
content. Deformations and artifacts are easy to add to images. The concept
here is that this is supposedly an image of someone who doesn’t exist, if what
you see is just a test-set image that’s deformed or has an artifact added to
make it look like it was automatically created then it’s not actually doing
anything... but the point is that you have no frame of reference to judge that
because you are only seeing the supposed non existing face.

So it’s only impressive is you take it for granted that it’s doing what is
claimed.

It’s impressive if you assume it’s impressive.

What I’m saying is simply that if they want to claim it’s impressive you
should be able to judge that based on the displayed result itself. Just
include the nearest match and it’s simple as hell for everyone to judge if it
actually did something cool or not.

------
meehatpa
Almost all the women with their ear visible have something shiny in the lobes.

------
toto444
They all have the same teeth.

------
paulpauper
The fake web is going to be even bigger than the dark web. it may already be

~~~
codeduck
reminds me of Artificial Inanity and the Rampant Orphan Botnets referenced in
[Anathem]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem))

------
rednerrus
If you look at enough of these they all start to look alien.

------
mirimir
Maybe Mirimir and my other personas should get selfies.

------
lwi19
Beautiful fakes but a simple trick can identify them quickly:

The right and left side of these faces are too similar. This is not the case
with real people.

------
Simon_says
Better: thiswaifudoesnotexist.net

~~~
gwern
I updated that last month with S2 samples, incidentally, so it's comparable.

------
dsmurrell
But can you do it from DNA?

------
mirado
I love this site and use it for my news. It's funny to find this here.

------
RocketSyntax
that robo cat is going to haunt my dreams

------
Forgivenessizer
These are not being generated on the fly, are they?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
No, if you quickly refresh you might get the same one again.

~~~
ryankrage77
They must have generated a massive dataset then, I downloaded 50,000 images
and didn't get any duplicates.

------
workingkamil
actually, that‘s a picture of my cousin

------
ekianjo
> "Imagined by a GAN"

There's no imagination involved.

