The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

After all, who's really signing this contract, anyway?

An AI demonstration website will show you photos of people who don't exist:

You encounter so many people every day, online and off-, that it is almost impossible to be alone. Now, thanks to computers, those people might not even be real. Pay a visit to the website This Person Does Not Exist: Every refresh of the page produces a new photograph of a human being—men, women, and children of every age and ethnic background, one after the other, on and on forever. But these aren’t photographs, it turns out, though they increasingly look like them. They are images created by a generative adversarial network, a type of machine-learning system that fashions new examples modeled after a set of specimens on which the system is trained. Piles of pictures of people in, images of humans who do not exist out.

It’s startling, at first. The images are detailed and entirely convincing: an icy-eyed toddler who might laugh or weep at any moment; a young woman concerned that her pores might show; that guy from your office. The site has fueled ongoing fears about how artificial intelligence might dupe, confuse, and generally wreak havoc on commerce, communication, and citizenship.

Ian Bogost goes from this to a discussion of alienation in crowds, and the delights of urban civilization. But I'm still stuck on the face generator. I might want to meet this person, for example, but she isn't even imaginary:

Here's a video explaining how it works:

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