Thread by @conspirator0

It's a great day for a quick look at a variety of suspicious Twitter accounts with GAN-generated faces. #SundayShenaniGANs

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technology used by thispersondoesnotexist.com and similar sites to produce fake faces)

cc: @ZellaQuixote

First up, we have @DrAdamAneevit, an antivax account with 38K followers and a GAN-generated face. Although this account's bio states that it is a "pArOdY", plenty of people are eating up its misleading tweets about COVID and vaccines.

As it turns out, @DrAdamAneevit (permanent ID 949263131800424449) wasn't always called @DrAdamAneevit. Wayback machine archives reveal that this account was previously a "news" account named @/ForFactsSake101.

(archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190205193508/https://twitter.com/ForFactsSake101/status/1092869221095297026

)

Next up is @RowcliffeAndy (permanent ID 1545105573997252608), an account created in July 2022 with a GAN-generated face. @RowcliffeAndy's greatest achievement thus far is spamming a meme until Dilbert creator @ScottAdamsSays amplified it.

Third on today's list of dodgy GAN-faced Twitter accounts is @ViktorKoval9 (ID 1497503918695530497). This account tweeted an image of a nonexistent tweet from a nonexistent blue-check account. The fake tweet contains a GAN-generated face, falsely represented as a boy in Ukraine.

Last, and possibly least, we have @StevieDougie (ID 324652265), a right-wing Twitter account that disapproves of Marxism and communism and has therefore (allegedly) moved from the United States to Vietnam, a country with a communist government.

How can we tell these four images are GAN-generated? There are a few tells: nonsensical backgrounds, mismatched/missing ears, weird artifacts where the hair meets the skin or background, and identical placement of the major facial features (as seen here:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1551305208285757445

)

Some tips on identifying GAN-generated faces:

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

Additional threads about GAN-generated faces and their use on (mostly) Twitter:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1457051817699860483

Note: the four accounts in this thread are presented as distinct examples of accounts that have GAN-generated face pics combined with other suspicious attributes. We found no evidence that the four accounts are related or run by the same entity.

The operator of the @DrAdamAneevit account was apparently not a fan of this thread.

The @RowcliffeAndy account has left a few replies to this thread. The attempt at falsely equating the use of a fake human face with the use of a cartoon avatar that no one would mistake for human has become a somewhat common tactic of bad-faith actors.