By The Financial District
Mar 14, 20211 min
The website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, developed by Phil Wang, showcases fake faces - computer-generated images of people who simply do not exist, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.
These photos and videos are known as deepfakes, and this is by far not the only website of its kind. Several other projects are bringing faces to life - both real and imaginary. Some people are even bringing deceased loved ones and famous personalities to life using similar technology.
A glance at the #DeepNostalgia posts being shared on Twitter right now shows countless videos of animated faces in black and white, from Anne Frank to late grandparents.
Over on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, the deepfaked, imagined faces come from two interconnected neural networks that are continuously trained with photos of real people to create these impressively realistic portraits.
One neural network calculates entirely new faces from all the possible human features it has memorized during learning, from face shapes to skin characteristics and eye colors to hairstyles.
The other neural network then evaluates the result with its own empirical values. If the fake face passes the "reality check," it's published.
Otherwise, the first network has to rework everything. More than 90 percent of the results are so realistic that if you didn't know how the portrait came about, you'd have no doubts about its authenticity.
But here and there, you'll notice a glitchy face, which is somehow reassuring.
There might be something wrong with the symmetry of the face, the peak of a baseball cap is growing out of someone's forehead or there are texture errors on the skin.