This Website Creates Photos of Cats That Don’t Really Exist

You want to know my favorite thing about the internet? There’s an endless supply of cat photosOpens in a new tab! Cat photos immediately boost my mood; I have such affection for the furry little critters that simply seeing one makes me feel better. They don’t even have to be doing anything! That combination of big, green eyes, a little pink nose, and whiskers is all it takes to put a smile on my face. I guess I just enjoy knowing they exist. Even if they’re cats I’ll never know personally.

That’s why I have super complicated feelings about a website I just learned about today. It’s called This Cat Does Not ExistOpens in a new tab. And as the title implies, it’s full of photos of cats that are not real. If you go to the site, it’s just a black background with a single photo in the middle. Every time you refresh, you get a new cat. And every single time, the cat in question doesn’t exist. Because these cats are GAN-generated. That means they’re created by an algorithm that synthesizes photorealistic fake kitties.

This isn’t new tech—we’ve actually seen it used before with human photosOpens in a new tab, too. But there’s something haunting when it’s applied to kitties. Maybe it’s the not-quite-right presentation of cat hair. Or maybe it’s that their eyes don’t look entirely normal. Sometimes the proportions are off, as if the tech blended a kitten face with a cat body. But for the most part, these felines look pretty real. So knowing that they’re not? Knowing these photos are just simulations? It’s trippy, for sure.

A split-screen image of two AI-generated cats from the website This Cat Does Not Exist.This Cat Does Not Exist

The Verge, where we first learned aboutOpens in a new tab the site, has some pointers on how to tell these images are fake. The fur is never quite right; it looks blurry around the edges in most photos. They also noted that the images are face-only. No body shotsOpens in a new tab to make things extra complicated.

I’m not entirely sure why this site exists. I guess to prove that AI technology is freaky as hell. In that way, it totally succeeds.