"FLICK_KAi", artificially generated portraits of museum visitors

Neural networks can learn to generate photorealistic images. Recent developments in machine learning show that in the future it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish whether images and videos are computer generated or real.
In the photo booth »FLICK_KA« in the ZKM foyer visitors have had their portraits taken over 50,000 times over the last ten years. These images were used as the training data set for the algorithm[1][2], which can now generate completely synthetic images from the combined characteristics of everyone who ever took a photo there.

[1] Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, and Jaakko Lehtinen, “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation,” in: ArXiv, 2017. Available online at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10196, accessed 08/17/2018.

[2] Tero Karras, “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation“, (2018), Available online at: https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans, accessed 11/05/2018.