I understand why "This person does not exist" is interesting. Generating a fake person seemed hard until we could do it.
But why is this interesting? Minus the animation, isn't this something any smart high-schooler could do with pen and paper?
But why is this interesting? Minus the animation, isn't this something any smart high-schooler could do with pen and paper?
What's most interesting about that is somebody actually bothered to put it together.
Though it did also occasionally spit out a "number" with a letter in it, like "q29199.951301068788".
This is also something a talented high-schooler could do well before now. The interesting part there is teaching a computer to generate plausibly-human faces, not the act of generating fake people in general. This is the same way.
This seems more interesting because it has practical implications. Generating chemicals that haven't been investigated is the first step towards a programmatic pipeline that can identify and investigate novel chemicals. These seem of particular interest because they're of the "doesn't currently exist" variety, rather than the "cannot exist under the laws of physics" variety.
Our 8 year old does this with pen and paper, and sometimes also with some website that lets you draw molecules (there's a few, forget which one(s) he uses). That said, his molecules aren't always possible (he understands valence but sometimes he makes mistakes with it or just stops caring about it).