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This post is a response to Xander’s Looking Outwards post on randomness, about the website thispersondoesnotexist.com. This website generates hyper-realistic photographs of people that do not exist. It is powered by AI and GAN (generative adverbial network).
To some degree, I agree with Xander’s post and find it really cool and inspiring that AI and technology is able to create such realistic looking faces. I am really interested to learn how this program works and how it is able to create such realistic faces with so much detail.
However, this website is also scary because the power of this technology can have many positive and negative implications. If this type of software can alter the face so realistically, any portrait photo can easily be edited to a “non-existing person’ without anyone noticing the difference. This could be really dangerous if mugshot photos or criminal photos were altered, or any important photo identification was altered.