On One’s Own Existence

My favorite spot on the old internet is a website called “this person does not exist dot com.” It’s a user interface built around artificial intelligence that generates faces of non-existent people based on millions of real photos. Its original purpose was to create fake profiles for scams.

Every day during lunchtime, I refresh the page about a hundred times. With each click, the result is always different, and it never ceases to amaze me. A blond child, then a lady with glasses, a suited executive, a black-skinned teenager, and so on. I spend about thirty seconds looking at each photo, memorizing their features, and then move on to the next. “Today, I met a hundred people who don’t exist,” I tell myself every day before getting back to work.

A hundred people a day, five days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months a year. If I had completed this, my fifth year since I started this hobby, I would have met one hundred and twenty thousand non-existent people.

But something happened yesterday. When I entered this person does not exist dot com, the face I saw was mine.