Transform Yourself Into a 15th Century Portrait Using AI

This Website Uses AI to Transform Any Picture into a 15th-Century Portrait

Keanu Reeves. (Photos: Stock Photos from Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock (left) and AI Portraits (right))

With the internet buzzing about the viral FaceApp, which uses AI to predict how anyone will look in 30 years, there's another service that will transform you into a work of art. If you've ever dreamed of how your portrait would look if it were painted by one of the great masters, this app is for you. AI Portraits uses information from over 45,000 15th-century masterpieces to help “paint” the portrait of any photo that's uploaded.

While there are plenty of apps and filters that promise to make your photo into a work of art, AI Portraits distinguishes itself with its GAN models. Many services use style transfers that alter colors, but leave the facial lines untouched. AI Portraits actually determines the best style for the portrait by analyzing the features and the background. This makes for completely unique and artful 4K portraits done in the style of the Old Masters.

The service was developed and created by MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab’s Mauro Martino, Emanuele Del Sozzo, and Owen Cornec, as well as Luca Stornaiuolo from Politecnico di Milano and Liza Gazeeva. The team focused on 15th-century portraiture as it was a period in art history when realistic depictions of individuals emerged. Interestingly, they point out that portraits of smiling or laughing individuals were rare and so encourage modern users to experiment and see what results occur when uploading these types of images.

Lady Gaga. (Photos: Stock Photos from Andrea Raffin/Shutterstock (left) and AI Portraits (right))

“Portrait masters rarely paint smiling people because smiles and laughter were commonly associated with a more comic aspect of genre painting, and because the display of such an overt expression as smiling can seem to distort the face of the sitter,” they write. “This inability of artificial intelligence to reproduce our smiles is teaching us something about the history of art.”

For those who are concerned about the privacy and safety issues that have come up in regards to FaceApp, the creators of AI Portrait are putting users at ease. “Your photos are sent to our servers to generate portraits,” states their privacy policy. “We won’t use data from your photos for any other purpose and we'll immediately delete them.”

So with that, feel free to upload away and see how you'd look as a classical portrait.