This AI Site Created 100,000 Photos of People Who Don’t Exist
News | By Stephan Jukic | October 27, 2022
AI image rendering technology keeps getting better. It may still have many flaws when generating images and photos -particularly of people- but the technology is still so new that it’s not entirely fair to criticize its potential.
In fact, one new AI program has demonstrated just that kind of useful capacity for doing photo simulation and generation well.
The platform, called Generated Photos, has released 100,000 completely realistic full body-and-head shots of nonexistent human beings. The AI behind the platform made all of them.
Photo credit: Generated Photos
Another interesting thing about these images and the platform behind them is that they’ve been made available completely free for any non-commercial use by others, so long as they share a link back to Generated Photos.
As the company behind these “photos” says on its homepage, “Super realistic whole-body images. Use them wherever you want and don’t worry about the legal stuff.”
What’s more, these full-body images are shots of imaginary people’s entire bodies and faces, all facing forward and looking very realistic.
Considering the penchant for bizarre rendering errors that many AI platforms have, this realism is a strong achievement by Generated Photos.
Some of the 100,000 images have already been commercially and privately used for various things such as gaming avatars, reference material, human images for mental health quizes, or even as NFT art.
As Artem Kan, a representative OF Generated Photos notes, “Full-body photos can do all the above things and much more than just faces,”
Kan further elaborated, “There are lots of speculations and prejudices against content generated by AI. Many people think of that exclusively as deep fakes, disinformation, and related malicious stuff. But the same people watch movies with deceased actors resurrected by computer technologies and go to ABBA concerts in 2022.”
These realistic simulacrums of people have also helped law enforcement in searching for suspects in sex offender cases, though the details on this are vague due to ongoing investigations.
Generated Photos commented on this last use case too, “Our photos help law enforcers to catch online predators and offenders. We cannot share many details on this as it involves personal information and cases with pending legal status,”
Another curious use case has been of an elderly former librarian using the face-rendering page on Generated Photos to whip up a younger version of herself that she used to get a remote job.
As we’ve explored previously, AI-rendered images have made lots of headway in the photography and art worlds. Despite recent bans by some stock photo sites on their uploading from third-party rendering platforms, companies and users seem to be growing more interested in exploring and using AI photos.
One major stock photo site, Shutterstock, has even announced plans to monetize photo rendering by AI platforms. To do this, the site is teaming up with OpenAI, the company behind the famous DALL-E image-generating platform.
The two companies are doing this to sell rendered photos stitched together from submissions by Shutterstock’s many photographer users.
Shutterstock plans on sharing revenues from these sales with artists and photographers whose work was used by the OpenAI algorithm for training.
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Stephan Jukic is a technology and photography journalist and experimental photographer who spends his time living in both Canada and Mexico. He loves cross-cultural street photo exploration and creating fine art photo compositions.
