I grew up in the midwest in an area where a lot of Germans settled many decades before I was born.

Later in life I traveled to Germany and just felt ... comfortable. I didn't speak the language or anything, wasn't talking to a lot of people, I simply saw all these faces that I felt I knew...

It was a very sudden change as I had already been to England, France, Italy and etc where things felt foreign and different. Then blamo, Germany and here are all these people I recognize / half recognize.

Similar situation, in that my family line is essentially 100% German, although I grew up elsewhere. When we visited my grandparents' home city, it was kind of a shock how much I looked like everyone else. It didn't make me feel particularly comfortable or uncomfortable either way, but it did surprise me how, well, related we all looked in a way that had never happened to me before.

My favorite part of the trip, though, was getting complimented on my English by other friendly but clueless tourists who asked me for directions and the like. I told them thank you, my parents were very insistent that I practice my English from a young age. Technically the truth! :D

Photographer Francois Brunelle has a photo series on people who look like they could be twins/related but aren't. Genetics is an odd thing.

https://www.chasejarvis.com/blog/me-myself-and-i-francois-br...

The crazy part about this is how little similarity it takes to fool us.

But those people are in fact related. If you could test their genetics, you could prove it. They have different variations on the same face that some successful ancestor of theirs once had long ago, which was conveyed to them in their own generation over hundreds of years by the inheritance of dominant genes.

You will find that people who have such similar faces also tend to think and act similarly also. Not a coincidence.

On a similar tangent, privacy issues aside it would be fun to see if you had an unknown twin on social media. Upload your picture, see if there's other pictures that look like you but have a completely different friend graph.

Such service used to exist: FindFace. It was essentially for finding people's VK accounts having only their photo, but finding people who look like you was one of the popular use cases. It was since closed (kinda) due to privacy outrages.

A similar one called FindClone has recently appeared, though I haven't tried it.

> I've come across people in life that I would have sworn were twins.

Like some kind of dejavu?

doppelgangers

You blew my Matrix joke, but fine, whatever...

My gut reaction is that the model does an apparently credible job of simulating faces, but cannot take into consideration their underlying biology. I would think a lot of the features these non-existent people have might be biologically incompatible for reasons we don't know. Facial features are incredibly sensitive to exposure to gene:environment interactions. So, I have doubts today they look like anyone real.