This MP Does Not Exist

June 4, 2020 10:53 AM

This MP Does Not Exist
I trained a StyleGAN neural network using official photos of UK Members of Parliament, then generated a whole new load of them along with names and constituencies (using segments from real MP names and structures of actual constituency names). The results are often blandly white, male & middle-aged, and occasionally very weird.

Role: creator

posted by malevolent (5 comments total)

All these MPs are actually representing the riding of Uncanny Valley. Here are some of my favourite candidates. Unsurprising considering the training data, but it does not do people of colour very well — or often. I only got those first two the entire time I was playing with it.
posted by 100kb at 5:57 PM on June 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I had some qualms about those under-trained images, if the obvious scarcity didn't make a point about the lack of diversity in Parliament (e.g. if it was just some kind of general person generator) then I wouldn't have been comfortable with using the results.
posted by malevolent at 12:12 AM on June 5, 2020

Gill Day's jacket, tho
posted by scruss at 5:52 AM on June 5, 2020

That’s awesome! One lady had a patch of beard stubble on her forehead. I did finally get a POC guy after a sea of bland older white guys and a few women.
posted by leahwrenn at 11:13 PM on June 8, 2020

This is genuinely alarming
posted by prismatic7 at 5:43 AM on June 16, 2020