If you’re already bored of using a filter to age yourself into the likeness of your parents, then I have some good news for you.

We’ve moved on.

Depending on who you follow, the pictures spamming your Instagram feeds will be selfies in the style of famous painters, courtesy of AIportraits.

AIportraits is a fun little widget built by researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Here’s The Verge with how it works:

The site uses an algorithm trained on 45,000 classical portraits to render your face in faux oil, watercolor, or ink. 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.

I used a picture of myself to try out the app. This was the result:

Just Kidding. That’s Quentin Matsys’s 1513 painting, A Grotesque Old Woman.

In all seriousness, though, the app does a pretty good job. Take Keanu Reeves for example:

Breathtaking.

You’re probably wondering what sets this apart from every other paint filter on your phone.

As the researchers point out, unlike earlier AI methods that created similar AI portraits, the algorithm here is not merely “painting over” your face in a new style. Instead, it uses what’s known as a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate new features from scratch.

You can see that feature at work in this much-improved image of Donald Trump:

To paraphrase Sarah Sanders – you could almost say that he looks presidential…

Certain elements within any selfie may prompt the algorithm to use a specific style. In the images below, for example, researchers say the algorithm “decides upon a Renaissance style, highlighting the elegance of the aquiline nose, the smoothness of the forehead.” If you try a few different selfies, you’ll certainly get different results.

Before you panic about the privacy implications (everyone is still a bit bruised after the whole FaceApp thing), your photos are sent to the creators’ servers in order to produce the portrait, but the researchers promise they won’t use your data for any other purpose, and any images you send are “immediately” deleted after use.

That’s nice of them.

Now stop avoiding the inevitable and get on spending the remainder of the day ‘AIportraiting’ your co-workers.

[source:verge]