According to TheVerge, a new website has been created that uses artificial intelligence to generate facial pictures of human beings. These pictures look very much real to the extent that you won’t be able to tell if it is generated by artificial intelligence if you did not know it already.
This website did not spring up suddenly. It is just a consequence of the events that have unfolded in the past few weeks. At the beginning of this month (February 2019), NVIDIA engineers working on StyleGAN (Style based Generate Adversarial Networks) project decided to make it open-source. StyleGAN can take data from real pictures, feed it into its generator to create new pictures that look very realistic. If you wan to try it out yourself, then you can grab the source-code for StyleGAN from https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan/commits/master.
NVIDIA has even created a Youtube video explaining how StyelGAN works. In this video, they show how the AI takes the data from multiple faces and combines it together randomly to generates newer faces. These new faces look different from any of the real people’s faces.
This new website https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ makes use of this open-source StyleGAN project to generate the fake portraits of people. As soon as you visit this website, it will create a fake picture of a person that has never existed. If you want more pictures, just keep refreshing the website again and again.
However, the artificial intelligence is not (yet) as smart as the human eye. While refreshing the website, you often come across pictures that look like very big mistakes as if some newbie has made mistakes using Adobe Photoshop. In some pictures, you can clearly see how different parts of face have been mixed together. In other pictures, it fails to take into account he jewelry being worn by the people such as the ear-rings. Now that StyleGAN is open-source, all these glitches will be removed through the cooperation of the open-source developers.