Thread by @conspirator0

Real authors are so last decade. All the cool casino news websites have authors with GAN-generated profile pics these days.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by tools like thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake face pics.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We found a set of 13 websites with a total of 70 "authors" with GAN-generated face pics, each with a corresponding Twitter account using the same GAN-generated image. The accounts were all created in August or September 2020, and all (allegedly) tweet via the Twitter Web App.

As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN face pics, the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same location on each image, regardless of the angle of the head. This trait becomes particularly apparent when all 70 images are blended together.

The 13 websites these accounts are theoretically "authors" for are also the websites most frequently linked by the network of supporting Twitter accounts. Online gambling and forex trading are the main topics of these "news" sites.

Each of the 13 websites has a page showing their "team", featuring the AI-generated pictures of the supposed "authors" accompanied by self-similar biographies that somewhat frequently feature rather odd grammar.

Although most of the websites are in English, we did find one in German (casinonews(dot)de(dot)com). It's quite possible that we did not find the entire network and additional sites in other languages exist as well.

The majority of the websites feature exactly six AI-generated authors. Exceptions include the aforementioned German-language site casinonews(dot)de(dot)com with three, casinonews(dot)world with five, and sportsbettingnews(dot)day with two.

Here are screenshots of the "team" pages from the remaining four websites, for the sake of completeness. We found what appears to be a slight mistake on the fxperk(dot)com "team" page..

In what is either an error on the part of whoever set up these websites or a bug in a script that populated the "team" pages, fxperk(dot)com "author" Catherine Johnson's biography begins with the words "Sample Description".

This isn't the first time we've encountered a network of websites with GAN-generated "authors" and corresponding Twitter accounts. Here's a thread on another group we studied recently that may well be part of the same operation:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1341917542223376384

Another similar network, although in this case the Twitter accounts had the same names as the websites rather than the "authors".

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1350237648540069888

We belatedly noticed that the Twitter version of one of the GAN-generated pics used by this network has been cropped slightly, possibly to hide a weird blob on the top of the head. (This also knocks the eyes on the Twitter version slightly out of alignment with the other pics.)