These People Are Not Real

AI just gets creepier and creepier.

I'm not complaining. I think it's fascinating what's possible with machine learning. And, because of that, more and more I am convinced we're living in a simulation. All of the faces you see in this post were created with machine learning. I explain a bit more about it at the bottom of the post. 

So, where did these faces come from?

A website called This Person Does Not Exist using a machine learning generative model. Hopefully I phrased that correctly. I don't code so I feel like I'm trying to describe an alien using its own language that I'm not familiar with. But, if you want to know all the facts, you can watch these 3 videos below. 

And, it works on more than just faces.

You can automatically generate cats, horses, chemicals, and art. If you have an image set of anything, you can train your own generative model. In the tweet below, Alexander Reben generated album covers from a set of 50,000 album cover images. 

AI generated album covers for imaginary bands. The video moves through the latent space of an album cover model trained from my hand curated set of 50,000 album covers. The images are chosen from an algorithm watching my gaze #aiart #art #ai #generative #video #loop pic.twitter.com/W0lK19klxR

— Alexander Reben (@artBoffin) December 30, 2019

So, yeah.

I was going to write about all the possible implications of technology like this and how I think it will eventually touch all of our lives in many ways but it was getting long and rambling and I think it's easy to see that generative modeling will continue to progress and improve like we've seen with other tech. It's another factor in our world to keep us on our toes and questioning if what we're seeing online is actually real and/or even deeper, what does 'real' even mean anyway?