---
title: "Mysterious Site Uses AI to Create Realistic Yet Horrifying Faces"
description: "In order to draw attention to IBM's new generative adversarial network, a website generates slightly-unsettling faces that were created by AI."
date: "2019-02-13"
modified: "2019-02-13"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/mysterious-site-ai-realistic-horrifying-faces"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
tags:
  - "ai"
  - "artificial intelligence"
  - "gan"
---

# Mysterious Site Uses AI to Create Realistic Yet Horrifying Faces

![In order to draw attention to IBM's new generative adversarial network, a website generates slightly-unsettling faces that were created by AI.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/mysterious-site-ai-realistic-horrifying-faces.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: This Person Does Not Exist/Tag Hartman-Simkins\</em\>*

## Rabbit Hole

When a mysterious Reddit post pointed me to [ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com](<https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/>), I expected to find a blog about a person's quest to get off the grid — perhaps like [Kashmir Hill's weekly attempt](<https://gizmodo.com/life-without-the-tech-giants-1830258056>) to cut a tech corporation out of her life for *Gizmodo*.

Instead, I saw this:

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/1-oh-no-1200x837.png>)

"Oh," I said out loud. I refreshed the page and the woman was gone, replaced by an equally uncanny, AI-generated image of a person — and absolutely zero explanation. (If you're having a hard time spotting the errors, look at her teeth.)

## Some Answers

A person who says they created the site [popped up](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280>) on Hacker News to explain what was going on. The website cycles through the results of a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which basically means that two AI systems duel each other to create a realistic imitation of something — whether it's a [caricature](<https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-draw-caricature>), a [level of DOOM](<https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-video-games>), or a [person's portrait](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-portrait-art>).

In this case, the GAN was built by Intel researchers and trained on photos of people's faces, [according to research](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf>) published to the preprint server *ArXiv* last week that the author shared in the *Hacker News* post. However, the same algorithm has also been trained on images of [anime faces](<https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1095131651246575616>) and [paintings](<https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1094685986691399681>), resulting in terrifying animations.

## Find the Differences

The results are far from perfect — one AI-generated woman's face was covered in red, worm-like streaks.

A man had what seemed to be a black hole swirling around in his neck. And then there's this one below, where a woman's hat seems to exert such a powerful gravitational force that it ripped a hole in the background. But aside from the occasional body horror errors, they look pretty good.

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2-oh-no-1200x833.png>)

**Try it Out:** [This Person Does Not Exist](<https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/>)

***More on GANs: [Here’s What AI Thinks A Bunch of Famous People Look Like](<https://futurism.com/ai-portrait-famous-people-celebrities>)***

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)