Wanna feel old? Manti Te’o was exposed as a catfishee 7 years ago this September. 7 years! I was a senior in high school when all that went down and remember every detail like it was like week, culminating with my favorite t-shirt ever made which said, “Play Like Your Fake Girlfriend Died Today!” which was released before Notre Dame was throttled by Alabama.
Anyways, that incident put the catfish epidemic on the national stage and thousands of people have been, unfortunately, victims of catfishing since then. People that are either A) assholes or B) ugly with no game, resort to catfishing to try and get with people. The challenge was finding a picture attractive enough but not familiar to the victim so they would continue on a virtual relationship with you until you said fuck it and moved on. Well, now, the game has changed. There is a new website called thispersondoesnotexist.com that generates pictures of people that do not exist. Never have, never will. The AI website takes features of similar people and combines them into a normal looking person. Now, how they get the pictures to work from I do not know. Probably Facebook and they will have another lawsuit on their hands but that’s a story for another time.
This site basically makes you a faceless man-giving you the ability to change your appearance with the click of a key. Don’t want to be a guy or girl anymore? Click! See someone that looks too similar to you? Click! Find someone good looking enough you can trick your train crush into thinking its you? BINGO! Te’o better stay off the internet for, well, ever, or else this poor guy is gonna fall victim to Lennay Kekua 2.0. And 2.0 and 4.0.
Bowles' Blog 