Thread by @conspirator0

Meet @Dilde97512368, a Twitter account with a GAN-generated profile pic that is followed by lots of other accounts with GAN-generated pics.

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

cc: @ZellaQuixote

60 of @Dilde97512368's followers have GAN-generated face pics, but that's not the only pattern. 15 of its followers use cat pics, 7 use anime pics, and some of the pics that are neither GAN faces, cats, nor anime pics are repeated across two or three of its followers.

We explored the follower networks of @Dilde97512368's followers, and found a total of 3204 accounts with the same mix of profile pics (anime, cats, GAN-generated faces, and repeated images), all created January 25th or later.

Almost all of the accounts in this network either A) follow a three-digit number of accounts and have few or no followers or B) have a three-digit number of followers and follow few or no accounts. Very few of them follow accounts outside of the network.

972 of the accounts in this network use GAN-generated face pics, with the interesting twist that nearly all are female and all have blank backgrounds.

Here's an animated demonstration of blending all 972 pics together. As is the case with unmodified GAN-generated face pics, the major facial features are in the same location on each image, with the eye placement being particularly well-aligned.

257 of the accounts in this network use anime pics, many of which bear artifacts suggesting that they (like the fact pics) were GAN-generated (note the vestigial head on @Ceylan34886674 and the distortion/lack of nose and mouth on @KarakulahVedia).

We previously ran across GAN-generated anime pics via 4chan, and wrote a rudimentary detector. It flagged 165 of the 257 anime pics used by this network (64.2%) as GAN-generated.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1320226536566542338

307 of the accounts in this network use cat pics as their avatars. Like the face and anime pics, these contain artifacts indicating that they are likely GAN-generated. The "fur" on both @Gzdem17160119 and @Glben64660310's profile pics melts into the background, for example.

An additional 997 of these accounts use profile pics that are duplicated across multiple members of the network (sometimes dozens). 219 of these appear to be logos of some sort, some of them containing Turkish phone numbers. Finally, 671 members of the network have default pics.

One last observation on the images: we've seen a network using a mixture of GAN-generated faces, cat pics, and anime profile pics once before, in the form of the now-defunct Thousand Followers network.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1294824510085050374

What do these accounts do, other than follow each other? 218 have never tweeted; the remainder reply to other tweets, tweet original tweets containing images (mostly porn/escort service ads), and tweet repetitive tweets (again, mostly porn/adult services stuff).

This network replies en masse to specific tweets, with dozens or hundreds of members replying to the same tweet. They reply to two styles of tweet:

• porn tweets, including the network's own content
• online sports betting tweets

Footnote: here's a link to all of our existing research on the use GAN-generated pics on Twitter (and occasionally elsewhere).

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1322704400226394112