This Website Is Turning People’s Selfies To Old Timey Paintings

We have had the privilege of turning ourselves to ancient shells and got how we could look like in the opposite sex or when bearded, but a new widget dubbed AI Portraits came up with a fresh new mode of fun that turns you into classic artistic portraits.

But this is not to say that it’s any less scary than what FaceApp is doing. It’s almost certain that many of us have thought about how we would look like as dust-covered, golden-framed oil paintings that hang on the walls of haunted houses with eyes following you as you walk about the room, kind of like Mona Lisa (No offence, Da Vinci).

Well, you can now just head over to aiportraits.com and behold you get your face rendered as a piece of classical art. The website which is home of a fun little widget developed by researchers at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab that uses an algorithm trained on 45,000 classical portraits to render your face to oil, paint, watercolour or ink.

“We have trained Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models to reproduce human portraits, with different styles and levels of abstraction,” the AI Portraits website explains. The database contains a massive number of styles with old-time impressionist painters like Van Gogh,  with each input producing a unique portrait.

The whole science behind this may be a little hard to explain to ai our in layman’s terms, but the researchers essentially taught GAN models to generate new paintings based on classic portraits.

The technology has been described as a better one compared to previous developments since the algorithm used does not paint over your face but instead generates new brand new features from scratch.

The algorithm doesn’t just copy the lines of your facial features, but it uses them as a base to generate an entirely new portrait.

The AI then comes into place and decides what format it will take and luckily enough if you don’t like the results that you get at first, you can take a different selfie (I took like a hundred). You’ll then be amazed at the different results you get every single time.

To be on the safe side unlike the Russian developed FaceApp, the website maintains that while the photos are sent to the site’s servers to generate the portraits, the data will not be used in any other way and will immediately be deleted.

But with the privacy concerns notwithstanding, you’ll still have to deal with your creepily detached eyes as they exist in AI-generated form. It might seem like a new-age thing that is attracting masses but this one will haunt probably forever. Don’t say you weren’t warned.