Face-generating website is a catfisher’s dream

If you’ve ever watched the MTV show “Catfish,” you know that sometimes, online identities don’t match up with the real thing. The series follows people who fall in love online, only to discover that the face they came to love didn’t belong to the person who sent them online messages.

Usually, the fake identities were discovered with the help of Google’s reverse image search. Upload an image and Google will show you where else it may appear online.

But you could more easily disguise your identity if the photo in your profile picture exists nowhere else on the web. That’s where ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com comes in. Every time you load the page, you’ll get an AI-generated face that doesn’t belong to a real person. Some of them are quite good.

Some of them… are not as good.

So, yeah, not every AI-generated face will be a winner, but every time you refresh the site, you’ll get a new face.

Despite the occasional monster face, the technology is impressive. And you have to imagine a future where all of this gets much, much more sophisticated. Thanks to deepfake technology, we can map faces on videos of other people’s bodies. In the future, we may be able to project entirely different faces on top of our own, like those goofy “Mission: Impossible” masks, but holographic and on-demand. The future is simultaneously bright and terrifying. Stay vigilant out there, and if you see the creature in that last picture, run.

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