TLDR: I made a thing and it got some press.

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Judging people by their appearance feels icky. Why? Because there’s more to people than their looks; we need to consider the whole package.

(“But they have such a good personality!”)

But what if someone exists in appearance only? A cover without a book, solely for your judgement?

That sounds like a fun place to make guilt-free snap judgements, so I built it!

Please enjoy “Judge Fake People“, a place where you can vote on the appearance of people who don’t exist.

Background

Like many internet addicts, I was blown away by NVIDEO’s demo using style-based Generative Adversarial Networks to generate faces. They seem to have crossed a threshold for generating artificial images that can genuinely fool our brains.

Flash forward to last week when I saw Philip Wang’s amazing single-serving website thispersondoesosxist.com.

It was fascinating to see a photo-realistic face of someone that doesn’t exist. Philip’s writeup does a great job explaining his motivations and this implications behind this groundbreaking technology.

But I just wanted to turn it into hot or not.

So I wrote a script to download an image from thispersondoesnotexist.com every 5 seconds and built up a collection of around two thousand fake people. Then I made a voting system with php/MySQL and some filters to show the highest and lowest rated faces. And I enabled comments just for fun.

So sit back, relax, and enjoying rating the attractiveness of people who don’t exist right here.