Where the pictures came from

The pictures on these pages come from two places.

Made by us

The characters and backgrounds are our own work. The pictures in chapters 1, 7, 8, 11 and 12 come from a small model we trained ourselves on 18,000 pictures of those characters. No commercial generator was used, and the training material is ours, so the rights are clean.

From outside — photographs

The photographs in chapter 5 (finding dogs) and chapter 11 (real or fake) came from Pexels.

Training the machine in chapter 11 used 2,059 photographs taken by 1,114 people. The full list lives in the ledger file (experiments/photos/SOURCES.json).

Below are the people who took the photographs actually shown on these pages. Pexels does not require us to name them. We name them anyway, so that we can answer if anyone ever asks.

18

• Arijit Dey
• Atahan Demir
• Benjamin Bryer
• Diana ✨
• Fred dendoktoor
• JacLou- DL
• Julissa Pires
• Magda Ehlers
• Nathan Boomhower
• Nathaniel B. Gerhart
• Nguyễn Thị Minh Nghi
• Nikita Nikitin
• patrice schoefolt
• Plato Terentev
• Quoc Anh Tran Duong
• Sudhir Sangwan
• Tahir Osman
• Valentin Ivantsov

Sound

The sound in chapter 3 is made on the spot. No recordings are used.