On the website ‘ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com’ you see a new face each time you refresh the page. But they are all fake: the people behind the heads do not exist.

The website was created by software developer Philip Wang who wants to demonstrate with the project how good artificial intelligence will be in self-generating new images.

If you surf to ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com you will immediately see a random portrait. If you renew the page, you will get another one. And another one, and another one. Although they look very ordinary, it is in all cases a completely artificial photograph, made by a computer.

Artificial intelligence

The endless series of faces is created by a system based on artificial intelligence. The system studied a huge number of images of human faces and was trained with the help of those photos to generate completely new photos. Philip Wang, the software developer at Uber, finally wrapped this function in a website. He wants to create more awareness about the technology in this way. “Most people do not understand how good AIs will be in generating images in the future,” Wang explains to Motherboard.

Fake

Such convincingly realistic portraits do indeed raise many questions. Similar technology is also used to make ‘Deepfakes’, misleading films in which someone’s face is replaced with someone else’s face. As the technique improves, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish the ‘Deepfakes’ from real images. The fake faces generated on the website are generally astonishingly good, although the system also went totally wrong with some photos:

With this photo, the AI system seemed to seek a strange compromise between a toddler and a fifties. ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com – With this photo, the AI system seemed to find a strange compromise.