About

WhichFaceIsReal.com is a single-serving site which presents a user with two faces, one real and one generated by artificial intelligence, and asks them to identify the real person.

History

WhichFaceIsReal was developed by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington.^[1] The website uses the StyleGAN algorithm developed by Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila at NVIDIA.^[2] StyleGAN uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) approach to develop the fake images: one neural network generates a face, and the other attempts to guess if the face is real or not, each getting better until StyleGAN can create nearly unidentifiable fakes. WhichFaceIsReal pulls one of 70,000 real facial photos posted to Flickr under a creative commons license and puts it against one of the fakes, asking users to pick the real one. The fakes are taken from the database produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com, a similar single-serving site which used the StyleGAN network to post thousands of fake facial photos. (example page shown below).

Online Presence

On March 3rd, 2019, the site was covered by The Verge.^[3] There, West and Bergstrom stated they created the network with the intent of helping to educate the public about what such artificially generated images look like, saying the potential dangers of these fakes include, say a fake photo of a person used as blame for a terrorist attack. The site has also been covered by TechCrunch.^[4]

Search Interest

External References