With FaceApp having gone viral once again, you must’ve used it at least once to create your old-age photos. But did you know that you can get your artistic portrait done too?
Well, researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have come up with a new website named AI Portraits. It uses Artificial Intelligence to transform your photo into a portrait from the 15th century.
How does AI Portraits work?
According to AI Portraits, the website uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) composed of two neural networks. While one network recognizes portrait images, the other is used to generate vintage portraits. More than 45,000 portrait images have been used to train GAN.
But don’t mistake AI Portraits for a simple style transfer tool. To use it, you need to first run a picture of your face on the website.
Once you do, it modifies your facial lines to get a style that’s suited to that of an ancient portrait. The AI automatically selects the style for the portraits that the website generates. Of course, style selection for the portraits will vary depending on your facial features in the image and on the image itself.
Read: 5 Best Selfie Editing Apps For Android (2019)
What’s the downside?
However, this amazing website with its ingenious ability has a catch. For most of the time, you can’t get a vintage portrait of yourself or anyone else with a smiling face. But that isn’t the website’s fault.
Since ancient portrait images were used to train the AI, the website creates images based on what it was trained with. If you skim through vintage portraits yourself, you’ll find that almost none has a smiling face. This is because, in the old days, artists didn’t consider smiling faces as proper poses for portraits.
Are there any privacy issues?
After FaceApp faced allegations regarding privacy issues, AI Portraits has stated its privacy policy on its website. In the policy, AI Portraits mentions that your photo is sent to its server for generating a portrait.
Once its work is done, it deletes the photo immediately. The privacy policy also assures that it doesn’t use data from your photo for any purpose other than creating your ancient portrait.
As the server doesn’t store any of your data, you can use AI Portraits with no worries. Let us know about your experience in the comments.
