Home Technology A new site converts your selfies to classic portraits

A new site converts your selfies to classic portraits

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We’ve seen FaceApp recently go viral again all over social media with people posting pictures of themselves looking 30 years old than they currently do. It was all fun at first until people got a little scared about the security of it all when realising the app itself comes from Russia and we all know that the Russians cannot be trusted. Obviously.

Well, be prepared for a likely new trend coming our way as a new site, called aiportraits.com, this time developed in the US by MIT-IBM Watson AI Labs and therefore surely more secure, takes people’s modern self-portraits and turns them into classical portraits instead, as if they were painted by a classic painter themselves.

The site uses an algorithm trained on 45,000 classical portraits to render your face in faux oil, watercolour, or ink. There’s a huge number of styles included in this database, covering artists from Rembrandt to Titian to van Gogh, with each input producing a unique portrait.

However, this new technology doesn’t simply just paint over a person’s picture in a specific style, but apparently uses what is known as generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate new features from scratch, designed to give the photo a more realistic look better fitting of the era, including changing hairstyles and facial features to be more representative of the time.

However just to be sure hat the same security concerns aren’t raised again about this new site, the researches have already released a statement (as reported in The Verge) that the data will not be used for any other purpose and that once the image has been generated, the original photo will be deleted. We’ll have to see how long that lasts.

Last Updated: July 23, 2019

8 Comments

  1. Llama In The Rift

    July 23, 2019 at 16:29

  2. Original Heretic

    July 23, 2019 at 17:40

    Big deal, so your photos are in a database. Oh no, the Russians are gonna steal me!

    Reply

  3. HvR

    July 23, 2019 at 17:05

    Be careful this is a US company.

    The app takes your personal data and sends it to the Trump’s ban database and scans through your photos and uploads anything with ample skin to the secret Clinton e-mail server into a folder called “Bills_secret_fap_collection”

    Reply

    • Dr Webster Flexington

      July 23, 2019 at 17:32

      I’m more worried of Nancy Pelosi getting a hold of my pictures :o.

      But isn’t it amazing that we live in a time, where we’ve practically giving up our biometrics so eagerly and willingly. I’m sure intelligence agencies from around the world must be salivating at all this data, and these companies must be making a killing from selling it – granted this AI is freaking amazing. (Sigh! And yes, I fed a couple of my pictures to it. I have a nice collection of classic portraits with my mug on it)

      Reply

      • HvR

        July 23, 2019 at 18:07

        You will also find that they do not actually sell your data directly since it is now illegal in most countries and have always been a PR nightmare when it comes out.

        They feed your data into bunch of usage algorithms and models and sell that data; it is also worth more if it processed.

        Reply

      • HvR

        July 23, 2019 at 18:07

        In the end they only get the information you give them; just use the skip button when they ask you for more information than the bare minimum.

        Would also love to see how crazy my social media and internet usage pattern is; I only allow my kid to use my accounts to watch videos etc so that I can monitor what he is watching. So it is an interesting mix of firearms, politics, history, space nerd stuff, general gaming and Azzyland, Minecraft, bunch of Let’s players and Fortnite

        Reply

  4. Gr8_Balls_o_Fire

    July 24, 2019 at 10:02

    Not falling for that again thanks

    Reply

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