We already know not to believe everything we see on social media. But now we have even more trust issues thanks to writer and director Kyle Vorbach, who recently faked his life for a month on Instagram using the help of Artificial Intelligence.
Experimenting with a Stable Diffusion text-to-image AI model, Vorbach decided to fake some photos of his dog wearing tiny hats. The photos were so realistic that he figured why not use it to fake human photos, namely a profile photo of himself.
After trying out several methods with Stable Diffusion, Vorbach managed to create, as he called it, a “Ryan Gosling person.” The AI would come up with a fake photo of a person that looks a lot like him using the combination of Vorbach’s photos and those that belonged to actors Macaulay Culkin and Ryan Gosling –celebrities that people told him he looked like.
Vorbach was impressed with the result and decided to share one of the photos on his Instagram. “Easily the best picture I’ve taken in years,” he captioned it.
The photo got him positive reactions from his friends and family, so he decided to take his project to another level. He generated a series of photos that showed him at a Halloween party, meeting up with friends in Los Angeles, and getting a new car.
And everyone bought it despite the fact that he was at his parents’ house in upstate New York the entire time. No one doubted anything, even when he posted a fake with Gosling.
Despite his fake life scheme working as a charm, Vorbach ended up realizing this was just too much work. He ended up coming clean to his friends and making a video about the whole experience.
“When I started this project it was for fun, but it is a lot of work sifting through thousands of images all day and all night staring at a machine’s idea of your face until you don’t even know what you look like anymore,” he explained in the video.
