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Chess World Accuses Company of Inventing Fake Employees Using Online Human Generator
REGIUM, an internet-connected chessboard manufacturer, was suspended by Kickstarter after allegedly creating engineers using thispersondoesnotexist.com.
By Mitch Bowman
Mar 6 2020,
A Kickstarter campaign for an automated chess board was suspended Monday morning after multiple high-profile online chess communities called the product a hoax. Writers for Chess.com, Chess24.com, and Lichess.org accused the company making the product of creating fake engineers who had their headshots generated using artificial intelligence on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com.
The initial promise of the product, called REGIUM, was presented in a demonstration video last December. According to the creators, their robotic chess board is capable of moving chess pieces quickly and silently across its surface, allowing you to sync the board state with a variety of online chess apps and play physical chess with someone remotely. This was apparently all being accomplished by a matrix of electromagnets embedded in the board’s surface, which could be instructed by a chess app to maneuver the appropriate pieces. REGIUM called its board the "MOST AMAZING & REVOLUTIONARY CHESS E-BOARD."
Shortly after the Kickstarter was posted, all manner of problems and inconsistencies began to arise, most notably an accusation that its development team was fake. On the now-deleted About page of REGIUM’s website , a six-person team complete with headshots was shown; writers on Chess.com, Chess24.com, and lichess.org have each claimed that four of these people are not real and are instead machine generated models created using the website thispersondoesnotexist.com, a site Motherboard has previously covered.
Phil Wang, who created thispersondoesnotexist.com, told Chess.com he believes that there are distortions on the photos of four of the people that would be consistent with them being generated by a machine learning algorithm. The images were also not hosted anywhere else on the internet.
Both Chess.com and Chess24.com, sites where you can play chess online, posted that they ended sponsorship relationships with REGIUM.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7...uman-generator
See also:
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/reg...d-buyer-beware
https://www.chess.com/news/view/update-on-regium-chess
REGIUM, an internet-connected chessboard manufacturer, was suspended by Kickstarter after allegedly creating engineers using thispersondoesnotexist.com.
By Mitch Bowman
Mar 6 2020,
A Kickstarter campaign for an automated chess board was suspended Monday morning after multiple high-profile online chess communities called the product a hoax. Writers for Chess.com, Chess24.com, and Lichess.org accused the company making the product of creating fake engineers who had their headshots generated using artificial intelligence on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com.
The initial promise of the product, called REGIUM, was presented in a demonstration video last December. According to the creators, their robotic chess board is capable of moving chess pieces quickly and silently across its surface, allowing you to sync the board state with a variety of online chess apps and play physical chess with someone remotely. This was apparently all being accomplished by a matrix of electromagnets embedded in the board’s surface, which could be instructed by a chess app to maneuver the appropriate pieces. REGIUM called its board the "MOST AMAZING & REVOLUTIONARY CHESS E-BOARD."
Shortly after the Kickstarter was posted, all manner of problems and inconsistencies began to arise, most notably an accusation that its development team was fake. On the now-deleted About page of REGIUM’s website , a six-person team complete with headshots was shown; writers on Chess.com, Chess24.com, and lichess.org have each claimed that four of these people are not real and are instead machine generated models created using the website thispersondoesnotexist.com, a site Motherboard has previously covered.
Phil Wang, who created thispersondoesnotexist.com, told Chess.com he believes that there are distortions on the photos of four of the people that would be consistent with them being generated by a machine learning algorithm. The images were also not hosted anywhere else on the internet.
Both Chess.com and Chess24.com, sites where you can play chess online, posted that they ended sponsorship relationships with REGIUM.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7...uman-generator
See also:
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/reg...d-buyer-beware
https://www.chess.com/news/view/update-on-regium-chess