i remember the first time i stumbled upon thispersondoesnotexist.com it was way before the llm explosion and it was mind-boggling. the idea of an image of a person who doesn't exist, never lived, and never will (even if the images weren't that clean and you’d spot a weirdly melted ear or a hand that looked like a bunch of sausages). it was my go-to "btw" anecdote for years. the kind you pull out in discussions to flex how strange the future already is.

but now we’re at the end of 2025 (2026 is in three days) and image generation is in a whole different stratosphere. you basically can’t tell the difference anymore. social media is flooded with ai-generated slop and half my twitter feed is just fake pixels. the curiosity turned into disgust. and the disgust turned into a genuine fear, a fear of a dystopic future where every face i see on the internet depict a human who never existed.

to counter that i wanted to build the original site but in reverse: a place where every person displayed is real. but where do you get "real" people now? i can’t trust instagram or twitter even if you can still spot the fakes sometimes, i can't take the risk. i had two ideas. first: go out with my camera and take photos of actual humans (it's artsy but expensive since i only own an argentic camera and people get weird when you point an iphone at them). second: the internet archive. i spend hours browsing old magazines there (it’s a great experience btw) and i realized i could just pick up the photos from the pages. those people are real. for the process i tried to pick the background people , the ones who weren't the main subject, the ones who didn't get "chosen" the first time. i got this weird sensation that if i don't pick them i'm killing them again so i choose the forgotten ones. most are from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. these people might be dead right now but they do exist (not "did" they do exist because they happened). they lived fulfilling lives, or maybe they didn't, but they were there.

i used the pale blue dot as a background for the site. i felt like that is the perfect background image.

here is the website  this-person-does-exist.dev. there’s only around 50 images right now but i’ll keep adding whenever i feel like it.