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Can you use artificial intelligence (AI) to fake a life? In the case of Kyle Vorbach, you can. The writer and director used Stable Diffusion AI image generator to create realistic photos of events that never happened. He did this for a whole month, generating believable but totally fake images—much to the shock of his friends and family.
Vorbach produced a video detailing his foray into constructing his AI-generated life. He covered the technical aspects of the endeavor to the emotional impact it had on him. It began with a simple need: a new picture for his social media profiles. Vorbach was living at his parents’ house in Upstate New York, and he had some extra time to play around with the possibilities of Stable Diffusion. After loading a version of it onto his computer and tweaking it to learn his face, he was blown away by the results. “Easily one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken, and I never even had to leave my bedroom,” Vorbach recalls.
This inspired him to take the project even further. “I generated my Halloween costume. I used AI to generate an entire fake trip to New York where I met up with my friend, who was also generated with AI. Everyone was believing my pictures. That’s when things started to get weird,” he says.
The acts of generating images, sharing them online, and having everyone in your life believe them was a turning point for Vorbach. “If I’m already generating my pictures, why not generate a whole new life? A life where I moved back to LA, a life where I lived in a really nice apartment, and so did my dog. A life where I could afford a really nice car. A life where my career finally takes off. A life where I might even run into a random celebrity. A better life.”
The resulting pictures—and the reveal to Vorbach’s friends and family—proved that AI can make a fake existence look real. But it had downsides and led to some sobering realizations for the creator. “When I started this project it was for fun, but it is a lot of work sifting through thousands of images all day and all night staring at a machine’s idea of your face until you don’t even know what you look like anymore,” he says at the end of the video.
“Every time I got a like on one of those pictures, I felt those endorphins like it was me. Like someone I know liked a picture of me. Eventually, I didn’t know where I stopped, and Ryan Gosling person began.”
The experience offers a look at the technical capabilities of AI—and how convincing they are—but also the need to get off the computer and live the type of happy life conveyed in the generated photos.
Can you use artificial intelligence (AI) to fake a life? In the case of Kyle Vorbach, you can.
View this post on Instagram
The writer and director used Stable Diffusion AI image generator to create realistic photos of events that never happened.
View this post on Instagram
He did this for a whole month, generating believable but totally fake images—much to the shock of his friends and family.
View this post on Instagram
This led to a whole new (fake) life in Los Angeles, where he had a nice apartment, a better car, and casual run-ins with celebrities.
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View this post on Instagram
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Watch how he faked his life in this video:
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