If you visit the This Person Does Not Exist website, you’ll be greeted by a seemingly simple portrait. Reload the page, and another face will pop onto your screen. These people, however, do not exist in the real world.
The website, which was created by an Uber software engineer, utilizes a complicated artificial intelligence algorithm developed by the American technology company NVIDIA Corporation. They call it a “generative adversarial network,” or GAN for short. It was trained using tens of thousands of online photos.
“Generative adversarial networks learn to generate entirely new images that mimic the appearance of real photos,” NVIDIA explained in an online video.
The faces generated on the website come in all shapes, colours, genders and ages. And outside of a few glitches, most look shockingly real.
You can learn more about GAN in this NVIDIA research paper. The fake faces can be seen at www.thispersondoesnotexist.com.
