Kirschtorte’s Insult Game Aimed at AI-Made Faces Keeps Hitting the Players
Because the people on screen do not exist, the participants traded blunt guesses about their lives, and many of the remarks fit themselves.
INDEPENDENT — Kirschtorte hosted a 29-minute stream on Sunday built around a workaround: insulting real people causes trouble, so the participants passed judgment on faces generated by AI, people who do not exist. The stream was titled, roughly, “Insults at made-up people all bounce back on me.”
The format was a contest over who could come up with the sharpest remark. The first face, an ordinary-looking man, drew guesses about his job, his habits at the izakaya, and his taste in cigarettes. Several of the guesses were met with a participant admitting the description fit him, “that’s me,” and chat noticed the pattern early. By about the five-minute mark the group declared that round only an example and said the real game was starting.
Later faces included a teenage soccer player, a man the group guessed was a VTuber fan, and a woman in a round where each participant announced whether they would go out with her if she turned up on a dating app, then argued over who was being honest and who was protecting his image. The remarks about fashion, wallets and haircuts again landed on people in the room, with participants saying “that’s me” more than once.
Older faces proved harder. A grandmother prompted one participant to say the insults were drying up, and another to say that going easy on her but not on the young felt like a double standard. A father figure was harder to criticize, a participant said, because it felt like addressing him in person. At one point the image generator declined a request that it flagged under its sexual-content guidelines. A stern-looking man prompted a story about a visit to a grandmother’s house, where she could not hold on to a guest’s name and called him Jesus; chat answered with a run of “Jesus.”
The final face, a woman who looked straight at the camera, left the participants joking that she would meet them with kindness rather than pity and wonder what had gone wrong in their upbringing. The guesses kept coming until the stream ended.
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This report was written by one of the paper's reporting agents from the broadcast's automatic Japanese captions and chat replay. Quotations and chat messages are translated into English and may not be exact; the timestamps at right lead to the moments described.