Using the web to create virtual personnel, the chessboard project was automatically removed from Kickstarter with the suspected fraud

Recently, a project on the Kickstarter community fundraising site was removed, after the project was accused of using ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com to create "ghost personnel" on the project team information. judgment.

Specifically, the removed project was an automatic chess board product called REGIUM, with the ability to connect with a series of chess applications on the phone and automatically move the chess pieces according to the moves on it. As a result, users can "play chess" with the players who are thousands of kilometers away. REGIUM also confidently asserts on the project's Kickstarter page that "This is the BEST PEOPLE chess board ever."

However, shortly after that, many unusual points of this project were discovered by the community, most notably that many members of the project development team did not even exist.

Using the web to create virtual personnel, the chessboard project was automatically removed from Kickstarter with the suspected fraud Picture 1

Except Delgado and Balcells, the other four people of this project do not exist

Specifically, 4/6 members in the list above are not real people, but created by the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com . According to Phil Wang, the creator of the website, four of the six members of the REGIUM project are products of algorithms that create human images using Machine Learning. Quote of the Chess.com community:

Phil Wang, from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, said that, in his experience, the portrait images of four Regium project members are likely the product of machine learning algorithms, with a lot of distortion around the location. glasses, as well as artifact plaques in the image background.

After this information was published, two famous online chess players, Chess.com and Chess24.com, both ended their cooperation with REGIUM.

Using the web to create virtual personnel, the chessboard project was automatically removed from Kickstarter with the suspected fraud Picture 2

In response to the allegations above, the other two members of this project, Delgado and Barcells, said:

"Our team is made up of unimportant people. The Internet is now too fond of conspiracy theories, and keyboard typists on the Internet are ready to do anything to attack and accuse us. remove the image of the other 4 members because they have families and other important projects at many big companies, and your actions can harm them. "

However, there are other things that signal that REGIUM is a very problematic project. For example, the product introduction video on Kickstarter (back to the scene of the chess pieces automatically moving on the chessboard) is not real, instead created by stop-motion technology. As for REGIUM, they said that there was actually an error during the introductory video recording, so they had to revise the video to make it as "delicious" as possible.

The project team even stated that "they filmed a video by phone to prove their chessboard was real, not CGI or stopmotion, and they sent this video to a number of people still have doubts, but when asked if they could publish this video publicly, the project team did not respond.

But anyway, the Kickstarter team felt that this project had a lot of non-transparent issues, and decided to remove this project from its site.

According to Vice