Website called AI portraits turns your selfies into artistic portraits

What would you look like as a 17th-century portrait? Website powered by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab turns anyone’s selfie into a classical image

  • AI turns your selfies into portraits in a number of styles after being trained on inputted with 45,000 portraits  
  • Built by researchers at MIT-IBM Watson deep learning AI Lab and includes styles of Van Gogh and Titian 
  • AI portraits renders faces in faux oil, watercolour or ink and uses a generative adversarial network (GAN)

Advertisement

A new website can turn your selfies into Renaissance works of art by re-imagining them in classical portrait form.

AIPortraits.com was created by programmers from MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and uses an algorithm which was trained using 45,000 different classical portraits.

There’s a number of styles included in the database, covering artists from Rembrandt to Titian to van Gogh which allows it to render your face in oil, watercolour or ink.

Unlike similar apps like FaceApp, the algorithm here is not merely ‘painting over’ your face in a new style, according to the Verge.

AIPortraits.com was created by programmers from MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and uses an algorithm which was trained using 45,000 different classical portraits. There’s a number of styles included in the database, covering artists from Rembrandt to Titian to van Gogh

Using Deep Learning, the researchers loaded paintings from the Early Renaissance to contemporary art to help train the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models. MailOnline freelancer Peter Lloyd had his passport image converted into a moustache-adorned Victorian

Using Deep Learning, the researchers loaded paintings from the Early Renaissance to contemporary art to help train the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models. MailOnline freelancer Peter Lloyd had his passport image converted into a moustache-adorned Victorian 

It uses what’s known as a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate new features from scratch. 

Using Deep Learning, the researchers loaded paintings from the Early Renaissance to contemporary art to help train the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models. 

Instead of a simple filter, the AI ‘paints’ a whole new image based on the image you upload on the site. 

MailOnline health editor Stephen Matthew (pictured) turned his Facebook profile picture of him sitting in a filed into a classical portrait with dense eyebrows. The feature of a heavy monobrow was due to an error occurring from wearing glasses which could not be rendered by the system 

Stephen Matthews (pictured) is the UK Health editor and the real-life image (left) is clearly reflected in his classical image (right)

Stephen Matthews (pictured) is the UK Health editor and the real-life image (left) is clearly reflected in his classical image (right)

Science and technology reporter Joe Pinkstone used a holiday snap (pictured) and inputted it into the system

A bleak image representing Joe's solemn mood and his bygone likeness was created with a less than generous hairline and rather low down ears

The researchers behind the app say that the algorithm ‘decides upon a Renaissance style, highlighting the elegance of the aquiline nose or the smoothness of the forehead.’ It turned science and technology reporter Joe Pinkstone (pictured) into a bleak image representing both his mood and his classical doppelganger 

HOW DOES AI PORTRAIT WORK?  

It uses what’s known as a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate new features from scratch. 

Using Deep Learning, the researchers loaded paintings from the Early Renaissance to contemporary art to help train the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models. 

Instead of a simple filter, the AI ‘paints’ a whole new image based on the image you upload on the site. 

The researchers behind the app say that the algorithm decides upon a Renaissance style based on a person’s features and then renders it to match.  

The researchers behind the app say that the algorithm ‘decides upon a Renaissance style, highlighting the elegance of the aquiline nose or the smoothness of the forehead.’ 

In the past week, security fears were raised after some experts warned that it could access images from your gallery and keep the image that you modified.

But, the creators promise that they won’t use your data for any other purpose, and any images you send are ‘immediately’ deleted after use.

‘Your photos are sent to our servers to generate portraits. We won’t use data from your photos for any other purpose and we’ll immediately delete them,’ the site said.

FaceApp said in a statement last week that most of its photos are deleted within 48 hours of upload.

The images that it does select for ‘learning purposes’ are transferred to the cloud for better performance. 

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk