Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #ThursdayShenaniGANs
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By reverse image searching a GAN-generated face pic (i.e. the "faces" produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com), one can often find Twitter accounts with GAN-generated profile pics. Today's search led to a massive botnet with a bit of everything. #ThursdayShenaniGANs
cc @ZellaQuixote
cc @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of 16512 accounts, created in batches between February 18th and March 21st, 2021. All either follow or are followed by dozens or hundreds of other members of the botnet (and by very few accounts that are not part of the botnet).
The bots in this network are grouped into clusters of a few hundred accounts each that follow or are followed by many other accounts within their cluster. The accounts mostly don't follow accounts in other clusters, but do reply to them.
Running a Yandex reverse image search on a GAN-generated face pic sometimes returns other GAN face pics, as happened here. #ThursdayShenaniGANs
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake faces.)
cc: @ZellaQuixote
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake faces.)
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The Yandex reverse image search lead us to a page featuring 4 GAN-generated face pics, supposedly specialists with a pest control company in Ulyanovsk, Russia. #ThisRoachRemovalSpecialistDoesNotExist
The pest control company in question (Marafet) has locations in a number of other cities, and many of these locations also have an alleged staff of exactly four people with GAN-generated face images.
It's a Thursday, which is an excellent time to look at a recently created fake follower/retweet botnet that uses GAN-generated profile pics (similar to those produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com). #ThursdayShenaniGANs
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of 164 accounts created between October 9th and October 13th, 2020. All of them either have never tweeted or post all of their tweets (nearly all of which are retweets) via "Twitter Web App".
Here are the profile pics of all 164 accounts in this botnet, as well as the result of blending them together. Like all unmodified pics produced by StyleGAN (the neural network used by thispersondoesnotexist.com), the eyes, nose, and mouth are in the same location on every image.
