This Person Does Not Exist: Infinite Faces, Zero Humans

This Person Does Not Exist is a website with exactly one feature: it shows you a photorealistic portrait of a human being who has never existed. Refresh the page and you get a different one. Refresh again. Forever. No buttons, no explanation, no ads, just a face, looking back at you, belonging to nobody.

It’s unsettling in a way that a paragraph cannot prepare you for.

What is This Person Does Not Exist?

The site launched to demonstrate what a generative adversarial network could do with human faces, and it did that job so effectively that it became a cultural landmark. Two neural networks are trained against each other, one generating faces, one trying to spot the fakes, until the generator gets good enough to fool the detector. What comes out the other end are portraits that are, at a glance, indistinguishable from photographs.

The genius of the site is the presentation. It doesn’t explain the technique. It doesn’t show a grid or a gallery or a slider. It gives you one face, full screen, with the address bar as the only context. The name does all the framing work: this person does not exist. You look at a stranger with a slight smile and specific crow’s feet and a particular way their collar sits, and you have to keep reminding yourself that there is no them.

It also launched a thousand imitators, sites doing the same trick for cats, artwork, apartments, résumés, and, less charmingly, it made everyone on the internet permanently suspicious of profile pictures. That suspicion is healthy. This is the page that taught most people to have it.

What can you do on it?

Refreshing is the whole interface. But there’s a lot to do with a refresh.

• Play spot-the-tell. Every image has flaws somewhere, and hunting them is genuinely engrossing. Start at the ears. Mismatched earrings are the single most reliable giveaway.
• Watch the backgrounds. The network was trained on faces, so it treats the background as an afterthought. Look past the shoulder and you’ll often find smeared architecture, impossible objects and colors that dissolve into nothing.
• Check the accessories. Glasses frames that are a different shape on each side. A hat that becomes hair. A collar that merges into a neck. Anything the network saw less often, it renders worse.
• Notice the demographics. Refresh twenty times and you’ll start to see what the training data contained: and what it didn’t. That’s a quietly educational exercise about how these systems inherit the shape of their inputs.
• Use one as a placeholder. Designers mocking up a profile page or a testimonial section reach for this constantly, precisely because the faces are convincing and belong to nobody who can object.

See for yourself at thispersondoesnotexist.com.

Tips to get the most out of it

1. Look at the ears first, then the teeth. Faces are the network’s best work; small paired features are its worst. Ears that are shaped differently and teeth that fuse into a single white shape are the fastest tells.
2. Refresh with a keyboard shortcut. Hitting the reload key is much faster than clicking, and rapid-fire refreshing is where the strangeness really lands, a hundred strangers in ninety seconds.
3. Try to describe one out loud. Pick a face and narrate who they are: their job, their mood, where they’re standing. Your brain will do it effortlessly and instantly, which is the actual lesson of the site.
4. Show it to someone without saying the name. Ask them to guess where the photo came from. Then tell them. The reaction is the reason to bookmark this page.
5. Save a few and look at them a week later. Faces that seemed flawless in the moment often fall apart on a second viewing, once you’ve stopped being impressed and started actually looking.

If you like This Person Does Not Exist, also try…

• Library of Babel: another site built on a single vertiginous idea, this time about text: every book that could ever be written, already sitting there.
• Quick, Draw!: the friendly side of machine learning. Doodle, and watch a neural network guess what you’re drawing.
• The Useless Web: one button, one random corner of the internet you didn’t know existed.
• Zoomquilt: an infinite painting that falls into itself forever. Same hypnotic register, no algorithms required.
• More strangeness in Weird & Wonderful.