Forget Faceapp, this AI-Powered Website Turns Your Selfies into Vintage Portraits

I’m sure you still remember FaceApp, the not-so-cool but intelligent, controversial Russian AI-powered App that turned your selfies into an old version of you. Now there’s another smart AI-powered website that turns your selfies into vintage portraits. The AI is a classic version of FaceApp, in simple terms. The project is a product of the researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

And before we go into the nitty-gritty details about the new website, let us first dive on privacy issues first –a significant concern that emerged when FaceApp makers were enjoying their glory days. AI Portraits website sends a clear message on their take on privacy.

“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 researchers deployed a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in AI Portraits that learned over time from over 45,000 portrait images. The GAN entails two neural networks, one for recognizing portraits and the other for generating them.

The website not only changes the styling of your pictures but can also generate portraits through modifying the facial lines to suit a style for the portrait.

The only problem that you will likely encounter is that your smiling face won’t get a smiling portrait in return, because of reasons well known –probably most (if not all) the portraits the AI encountered were never smiling.

But you should definitely understand this, having bumped into various old portraits –I bet I haven’t yet seen a portrait of Isaac Newton smiling.

N/B: The website is currently down, but we hope it will be live soon

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