UPDATE 8-21-21: it’s back https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
UPDATE 3-13-2023: so it looks as though AI has picked up enough where a fun website like this is now behind a sign up. That’s kind of a bummer because it was fun just to bounce through this and come up with a couple fake faces. Sure divulging an email isn’t too much of a problem, but with everything behind some sort of identification process it takes a little bit away from the internet each time. I’m not saying that anonymity is make or break but it is appreciated. So unfortunately this website does not work anymore but I’m sure you can generate one on the many other openAI Platforms. Also, thank you Frank, the guy that left a comment without a way to get back to him that this website is down. I didn’t think people would actually be visiting my website but that’s nice to know that somehow people can get to this site. Thank you Frank, whoever and wherever you are!
So there’s this website has been around for quite some time, and by quite some time I mean a few years. (For someone who lives on the internet like myself, 2 years is is quite a long time) Anyway, the point is, a few years ago I was looking for some facial references. Can’t really remember what the project was, but I do remember it was about focusing specifically on facial features. Basically I needed reference images, but it would be great if that reference image wasn’t of somebody I knew. The problem was, where to look for reference images, specifically up faces. Maybe Facebook? Well, I don’t have a Facebook account meaning I can’t just log in and type in ” John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and get a random reference. Maybe Google Images? If I need more than one image it’s going to be hard to find them at the same resolution consistently. That would mean a lot more Photoshop work. Well, what about stock images? That’s kind of provide a similar issue to using Google Images. Eventually I settled on making a Reddit post about looking for reference photos of facial features. I can’t remember the user, but somebody on Reddit pointed me toward this:
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Bingo!
So what is this do? In the simplest terms it’s an AI program that grabs a whole bunch of facial features from a whole bunch images and morphes them together as a completely new face. To everytime you refresh that page you’re going to get a totally unique face.
So what’s the purpose? Well, really the sky is the limit, right? For my project it was just a reference image that didn’t reference anyone in particular. It also saved me time from Scavenging the internet for a random stranger that I wouldn’t feel guilty staring at like psychopath.
Are there drawbacks? Aren’t there always? Basically when you’re making an amalgam of a bunch of different facial features you’re bound to run into some issues. As you can see in the picture above, the third result wasn’t the best. Something happened with the eye where it didn’t produce the best result but overall it’s a success.
So why am I posting this? I don’t know, I thought maybe it could help some random stranger who is in the same situation I was!
-mh
That is indeed a cool site. They seem to be down at the moment. I hope they come back up soon ’cause I like browsing through people that don’t exist for some weird reason… like a completely noncommittal version of tinder or something.
Alas, your barbaricmelons.com SSL cert is broken – it’s only valid for web-hosting.com so my browser would not connect to it until I removed the ‘s’ from https: in the URL – but at least then it worked without trying to force SSL so it did way better than most sites with busted SSL certs!!! 🙂
Holy cow, a real comment!?