Yes, I’ll admit that I felt a cold chill down my spine.
I’m pretty familiar with the ways of neural networks and as such I’m well aware that these portraits don’t depict any real person. No, they are artificially generated after processing zillions of human pictures to build up millions of ‘concepts’ about the way a human face should possibly look, and then by combining those concepts into always different images of non-existent people apparently having an own marked identity and personality.
But something within me wouldn’t listen to reason: they looked so incredibly real… thus in order to stifle once and for all that nasty inner voice I fed google with a number of them and asked it to look for similar ones online.
And… no match, nothing, zilch: those people simply don’t exist and never did. Period.
Which leads to a reflection:
according to the naysayers using an AI to generate images would infringe someone’s copyright, and using those images would be “stealing” other people’s work.
Yet applying such gut feeling… opps, ‘reasoning’ to those AI-generated human portraits doesn’t look terribly realistic: there’s no style to be stolen (not to mention that a style cannot be copyrighted), and no one could ever claim that their facial features have been used without their consent. Who’s rights are being infringed?
I agree, it’s understandable that lifestyle photographers and models may fear for the continuity of their job, not unlike the draftsmen when the first Autocad was released decades ago; but the disappearance of the drafting board didn’t kill their profession, it just moved it one notch up. For professionals flexible enough the new tools won’t be the gibbet’s trapdoor, they’ll be a door open on plenty of new unexplored ways to express their creativity.
Prompt & postprocessing
It should also be remembered (for those who forgot it) that getting decent AI-generated images is not just a matter of snapping fingers or pushing a button, in the same way as taking a decent photograph is not just a matter of tapping the smartphone and uploading the pic to Shutterstock
Issuing the right prompt entails more than a pinch of ingenuity, experience and creativity, and getting the image the way you like needs a good deal of patient experimentation and very accurate postprocessing, just like a real photograph.
Speaking of postprocessing, let me tell you about a curious aspect of it: it isn’t just a matter of conferring a particular flair, light and atmosphere to the AI-generated images. While inspecting my images at 100% after upscaling, I was disappointed noticing that they looked like illustrations rather than as real pictures. To fix that I had to contrive a not-so-simple Photoshop action that took good care of the inconvenience, and now I’m satisfied.
The portrait collection
Hope you’ll like my AI & I “portraits”: I’ve prepared for you three thickly packed pages of them.
I went for spontaneity and simplicity, no extreme fashion or makeup, just people like you and me and the ones we see while shopping.
Oh, I nearly fell desperately in love with the gentleman with silver beard and hair (in the lower right corner of the collage above). I took a dozen AI-snapshots of him, selected the best ones for you and kept the rest to myself. My husband is getting a little jealous and I think he’s growing a beard… 😉