Olesya Chernyavskaya is an artist who works with AI, and her new project is https://thisolesyadoesnotexist.glitch.me. As she writes …
GAN generated photos of Olesya, a project by Olesya. If this Olesya doesn't exist, which one does?
**To make this, I've trained a StyleGAN2-ADA model on 2445 real photos of me.&&&
I really dig this idea. The "X does not exist" trick with GANs is by now pretty common — as "This Cat Does Not Exist", "This Person Does Not Exist", or "This Rental Does Not Exist". (In fact there's actually a metasite that gathers links to people creating "…. does not exist" GAN projects.) Up until now, the fun/weirdness/creepitude of "synthetic image generation" has been in precisely this: Attempting to create a photorealistic thing that isn't real, so we can marvel at how real the unreal thing looks.
What Chernyavaskaya is doing here is subtly more interesting: Creating new iterations on a person that does exist. I wonder what it'd be like to behold thousands of photos of yourself that you never posed for? If you tweaked the GAN to display a range of emotions and expressions, maybe it'd be like a magic mirror, offering you visions of a slightly different version of yourself.
Chernyavaskaya has a pile of other wonderful AI-brokered art projects on her web site — go check 'em out. (Bonus points for the sumptuously aggro late-90s HTML design on her personal site, lol.) One of my other faves of hers is "Isolation", a site that shows you reactionary disinfo– like climate-change denial — when you look at it, but when you cover your eyes, the site shows accurate info (like, climate change is real). Another fun one is a website she made where the design changes every time you blink.
Oh, and a lot of her projects are hosted on Glitch, so you can easily remix the code to tinker with yourself.
