You’ve all used the controversial platform, FaceApp and saw yourself ageing, giving you the chills. Now there’s another face-filtering platform on the loose, which basically converts your photos into 15th century portraits, using artificial intelligence (AI).
It’s called the AIportraits.com and unlike the FaceApp which only worked on Android or iOS mobile devices, this one can be used on the PCs as well. And before you start worrying about the privacy concerns of sharing your photo with the platform, here’s what they have to say:
“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 platform has been developed and created by MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab’s Mauro Martino, Emanuele Del Sozzo, and Owen Cornec. In addition this, Luca Stornaiuolo from Politecnico di Milano and Liza Gazeeva have also been part of coming up with the service.
But you must be wondering, why 15th century portraits in particular, when AI these days is capable of doing anything?
We focus on the 15th century Europe, which is considered by art historians like Joanna Woodall, Shearer West, John Berger and many others, as a stylistic inflection point in the history of portraiture marked by the emergence of realistic depictions of individualsAI Portraits Ars
The team researchers and engineers have also highlighted the use of AI to reproduce human portraits with different style and texture. This was made possible after adopting and training data set of thousands of paintings from the Early Renaissance to Contemporary Art, which reflects on the importance of AI fairness.
So it’s fairly clear that unlike FaceApp which had privacy ramifications, AI Portraits Ars is focused on exploring history of art and portraiture, using 15th century paintings as the reference.
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