A website that shows a single photorealistic face on a white background and a new one each time you reload, every one of them generated by Nvidia's StyleGAN and none belonging to a person. Launched in February 2019 by a software engineer to make a point about how good the models had got. It made the point to tens of millions of people, and its faces became the default profile picture for bot accounts.
February 2019, refreshing it forty times in a row and feeling something between wonder and grief. Every face looked like someone I had nearly met.
Seen in 2024 in a fake LinkedIn profile, the same slightly melted glasses the site had produced in 2019. The bot farms never upgraded. They did not need to.
The record notes the tells that the site taught a generation: asymmetric earrings, a background that dissolves, hair that becomes a hat. Every 'how to spot a bot' guide since is a description of this site's failures.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
