This is not a person.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to build an investigative profile, but there’s a whole load of little details to get right. One of the most important is the face you give your character.

It’s something that brings two problems to solve:

1. giving a realistic face to my digital avatar without harming the rightful “bearer” of that image.
2. stopping google image (or bing, yandex, etc.) from being able to find where you lifted that image from.

The site I want to tell you about gives you a pretty handy solution to both problems: This Person Does Not Exist.

The site lets you reach a single page: the one showing a photo generated by a neural network. Every visit or refresh serves you up a new close-up.

On the whole the photos are genuinely convincing, even if some can show heavy imperfections.

Let me (re)pose a thought a friend suggested to me: what exactly is the business model behind this site?

Update, 28 March

Spurred on by Paolo Attivissimo’s article on the same topic, I had a look around and I have to admit that, after this first site, others more or less similar have popped up:

I’m afraid this is only the beginning…

update 02-07-2019

Fakeface: A RESTful API for thispersondoesnotexist — another service worth a look beyond what’s shown above.