The CSS of this button is nothing out of the ordinary:

7 min readDec 5, 2020

Generated Media specializes in creating artificial faces. To do this, it uses a technology called generative adversarial networks (GANs), which pit two warring neural networks against each other. In Generated Media’s case, as the networks duke it out, one network (called the generative network) gets better and better at generating artificial faces. GANs technology is so good that it can produce fake faces that easily fool humans into thinking they’re real. The company made a splash in a recent New York Times article about the tech behind fake faces.

A computer might make the same mistake, too. To test how similar my A.I. doppelgänger and I look, I compared our faces using a face comparison API from Face++, a ubiquitous provider of facial recognition software. Face++ returned a “normal probability” that my face matched my A.I. clone’s and estimated with 64% certainty that we were the same person.

Do we look exactly the same? No. For one thing, I would never wear my hair like that. But we look close enough that contacts beyond my close friends and family might mistake the fake for me — especially if I used the fake on a social media site like Twitter, where profile photos are a scant 49x49 pixels.

In my testing, I found that the more recognizable a face is, the harder it becomes to find a convincing fake. To test this, I uploaded a photo of Donald Trump to the Anonymizer. The results looked totally different from his actual appearance. For better or worse, I’ve almost certainly seen more photos of Trump’s face over the past four years than I’ve seen of my own. When you compare an extremely familiar real face like Trump’s with a fake, the little flaws in the fake are glaringly obvious. For less familiar faces, they’re easier to overlook, and the fake appears more convincing.

In a similar use case, the company has worked with investigative journalists, using a related tool to create fake faces for sources who wish to remain anonymous. The fake face can give a journalist (and their readers) a sense of the source’s age, skin color, hair length, and other key elements of their appearance, while ensuring that their real identity remains protected. (Journalists who use this tactic to protect their sources should acknowledge in their story that the face is a fake and is being used to protect a sensitive identity.) Clearview AI downloads millions of images from news articles and social media sites, so including fake faces in sensitive articles is a good way to prevent Clearview from indexing a source’s face and linking it back to a sensitive article.

GANs can also perform this feat on a massive scale. Generated Media is less than a year old and has already created more than 2 million fake faces. The faces represent people of every possible age and appearance. They look completely real, but the people they depict don’t actually exist and never have. Generated Media licenses them as stock photos on its website Generated.Photos and uses them as training data to reduce bias in other A.I. systems.

In an interview, Tyler Lastovich, head of strategy for Generated Media, told me that the company built the Anonymizer after he was “personally approached on LinkedIn by someone using a Generated photo as their avatar” and after the company saw “many, many more [of its photos used as profile images] on Twitter.” Others have attempted to create tools that use A.I. to obscure the identities of protestors and activists online by subtly altering their profile photos. But Clearview told the New York Times that these tools do not work to trick its systems. A totally fake photo like the ones created by Generated Media would likely be a safer solution.

This suggests another use case for the system. The Anonymizer’s killer app may not necessarily be creating face clones that your contacts will believe are actually you. Rather, the system may be best for situations where you want to give a sense of your appearance to a person you’ve never met before, while keeping your actual appearance anonymous.

With its massive database of images, Generated Media is now turning its attention to consumers. With a tool launched today called Anonymizer, the company allows you to upload a real photo of your face and receive a variety of fake faces that look similar to your own. You can then use the fakes instead of your real face on social media or anywhere else that you need to post a photo on the public internet. The fake photos are free for personal use and come with an option to use a transparent background.

The fake photos, Generated Media says, should look enough like you that contacts will find them believable. But because they’re not actually you, if Clearview or another facial recognition company adds your fake face to its database, it won’t be able to use the fake face to find the real you. Generated Media says users can swap out their photos for new fakes “at least every day” for an extra measure of anonymity.

Now to the fun part of the CSS: the background gradient. There’s two CSS elements at play here: the linear-gradient(), which is responsible for the background colors, and the keyframes, which handle the animation to make it appear to shift over time.

Here we are side by side. Because the fake face had a transparent background, I was able to superimpose it over a photo I took at the same fancy pizza place where my real photo was taken.

Here is the CSS I added to my button and the button’s :hover state as well to make this happen. Note the comment // button css here this is where the button’s original CSS is, I just omitted it from this screenshot for ease of seeing the additional code.

Dating profiles, Generated Media says, are a prime example. If you’re creating an online dating profile, you can grab a fake image from Generated Media’s Anonymizer and use it in place of your real face. The image would give a good sense of your appearance — if you met someone special and later chose to reveal your real face, they hopefully wouldn’t feel catfished. But until you chose to reveal the real you, the fake face would prevent the cyberstalkers who frequent dating sites from knowing your exact appearance and targeting you IRL.
Generated Media’s Anonymizer presented me with a grid of about 20 look-alikes, with the option to view more. I scrolled through and chose a fake face that looked the most similar to my own.
That’s not perfect, but it’s not bad for a fake face imagined by a computer, and results should improve over time. The Anonymizer works by analyzing a user’s face and finding the closest match from within Generated Media’s existing database of fake faces. As the company generates more fake faces, the chances of finding a highly believable match will increase.

The CSS of this button is nothing out of the ordinary:

Written by Pramod Bhanuka Bandara Rajapaksa

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