After FaceApp, new AI tool turns selfies into creepy classical portraits

The last week on social media was like living in the future: All our friends were suddenly 80-years-old. However, the trend that’s riding over netizens this week is moving back to the past. Way, way back!

Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have created an online AI tool that turns your 2019 selfies into archaic portraits. They are calling it an artistic transformation. The tool is available on aiportraits.com.

The tool uses an algorithm trained on 45,000 classical portraits, which helps it to turn your face into an oil, watercolor, or ink portrait. 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.

Apparently, the AI algorithm does not just copy the lines of your facial features and give it an effect of a portrait, it uses your facial lines as a base to generate an entirely new portrait. The algorithm is made of two neural networks, one learns to recognize portraits of people (Discriminator), and the other learns to generate them (Generator).

If you are thinking about Google’s Art and Culture app right now, hold on a second. You may remember it to be similar, but the Google app did not create a portrait out of your selfie, it simply matched it with your doppelgänger in one of several art museums worldwide.

Coming back to aiportraits, the algorithm apparently picks up certain elements from a picture to use a specific style in the portrait. Researchers say that the algorithm “decides upon a Renaissance style, highlighting the elegance of the aquiline nose, the smoothness of the forehead.”

Love this portrait version of a selfie! #portrait #selfie pic.twitter.com/EotQN9JrYw

— Christopher Wray (@CSBWRAY) July 21, 2019

This is pretty cool! You give them a selfie and AI generates an old school portrait of you. #AIportraits pic.twitter.com/euCKaj2Jw0

— mrrassassin (@mrrassassin) July 22, 2019

that’s too funny I- #starwars #AIportraits pic.twitter.com/syaxDjh5HG

— Marilia (@Marilia_Lulla) July 21, 2019

Having some fun with the #AIportraits thingy from https://t.co/1ngYmfU0OT today! Is it just me, or does the first one look like Peter Cushing? pic.twitter.com/KfJHnd3gkx

— TheFullPricePodcast (@FullPricePod) July 22, 2019

I’m speechless #AIportraits pic.twitter.com/7p94SO5Kjo

— The dilettante ️‍ (@Oxynom) July 20, 2019

Had too much fun with #AIportraits, got a surprisingly Low Countries vibe from these! #portraiture #ai pic.twitter.com/IIuCluqA5u

— Aurélie Debaene (@DebaeneAurelie) July 22, 2019

#AIportraits Choose your fighter: pic.twitter.com/WuriHBhNVB

— With Chris and Keith (@WithChrisNKeith) July 22, 2019

Of course, by this point, you are also wondering about how safe this tool is considering we just recently learnt about the privacy loopholes that came with using FaceApp. However, researchers behind aiportraits promise they won’t use your data for any other purpose, and any images you send are “immediately” deleted after use. Can we trust them? Who knows, at this point!