I describe how I made the website ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net (TWDNE) for displaying random anime faces generated by StyleGAN neural networks, and how it went viral.
Generating high-quality anime faces has long been a task neural networks struggled with. The invention of StyleGAN in 2018 has effectively solved this task and I have trained a StyleGAN model which can generate high-quality anime faces at 512px resolution. To show off the recent progress, I made a website, “This Waifu Does Not Exist” for displaying random StyleGAN 2 faces. TWDNE displays a different neural-net-generated face & plot summary every 15s. The site was popular and went viral online, especially in China. The model can also be used interactively for exploration & editing in the Artbreeder online service.
TWDNE faces have been used as screensavers, user avatars, character art for game packs or online games, painted watercolors, uploaded to Pixiv, given away in streams, and used in a research paper (2019). TWDNE results also helped inspired Sizigi Studio’s online interactive waifu GAN, Waifu Labs, which generates even better anime faces than my StyleGAN results.