With just a mouse click, you can delight in mega-litters of adorable kitties, admire countless fresh anime characters, or stare into the twinkling eyes of all sorts of beautiful people. The only catch is that they’re all fake. As Synced previously reported, these hyperrealistic images now flooding the Internet come from US chip giant NVIDIA’s StyleGAN, a generative adversarial network based face generator that performs so well that most people can’t distinguish its creations from photos of real people.
Soon after StyleGAN was open-sourced earlier this month, Uber software engineer Philip Wang used the tool to create “This Person Does Not Exist,” a website which generates a new hyperrealistic fake human face every time it’s refreshed. The site quickly went viral and has been covered by major global media. While many comments have praised the realism, more than a few regard the generated faces as a little creepy.
In a Facebook post, Wang says he wanted to “raise some public awareness for this technology,” as StyleGAN represents the current state of the art in generative adversarial networks.
If the synthetic faces have you wondering “Are you sure this is not a real person?” you’re not alone. University of Washington researchers Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom have created the polling site “Which Face is Real?” which aims “to help you spot these fakes at a single glance.” One emerging consensus on the interactive site seems to be that blurry backgrounds, overly smooth skin, and weird ears are signs to look for when identifying fakes.
Theoretically, StyleGan is trained to generate human faces, but it can also learn from and work with other image categories. One thing the Internet can’t seem to get enough of is cats, and so by popular demand Wang has added a kittie generator, “This Cat Does Not Exist.” The faux felines will fool most — although there are also some Frankenstein-esque errors.