When Tech Leaves No Space for Humans
We created technology to preserve humanity. Instead, technology will preserve itself.
In mid-February, a new website made the rounds. Hit refresh on thispersondoesnotexist.com and you’ll see a human face, but not a face that actually belongs to a human. Instead, it’s a nearly-perfect computer-generated image, at a glance imperceptibly different than a genuine photograph.
Phillip Wang, a software engineer at Uber, built on work by researchers at Nvidia and created the site to “raise some public awareness” for the technology that creates these images: generative adversarial networks, or GANs. These are programs with two neural networks. One of them generates an image; another determines how realistic they are and challenges the first to improve on its output. The goal is to create something that’s virtually indistinguishable from a real-life human face.
The people Wang’s site creates look real. They could be anyone. But they are no one.
A few days after the site launched, OpenAI revealed a tool that can write cohesive paragraphs of text given minimal human prompting. They call it…
