If you’ve ever wanted to see what you might have looked like through the eyes of Rembrandt or Raphael, here’s your chance.
The app, called AI Portraits, uses artificial intelligence to change a photograph of anyone to resemble an old painting, with a special focus on 15th-century portraiture.
“Due to the overwhelming popularity of the site, we are currently down for maintenance,” a notice on the site said.
In case you’ve ever wanted to see actor Jason Momoa through the eyes of a classical painter, AI Portrait can do that for you. Credit: Getty Images/AI Portrait AR
The app uses data to turn your face into art
AI Portraits uses data from tens of thousands of paintings, ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary era.
In this case, it compares photos to 45,000 paintings in the program from Old Masters like Titian and Rembrandt.
The technology also creates a “discriminator,” which judges whether a given example is fake.
The program does have a basic blind spot, the MIT Technology Review says: Because smiling was rare in Renaissance portraits, the AI has a hard time showing your glee if you put in a smiling selfie.
Popular photo apps have generated privacy concerns
AI Portraits works differently from FaceApp, which drew skepticism for its privacy policy and for having been developed in Russia.
AI’s privacy policy says, “Your image will be sent to an IBM server in the US, processed by IBM for the sole purpose of generating a renaissance style portrait based on the pixel information from your uploaded image, and then immediately be deleted.”
All tech companies deal with deep concerns over how they handle user data, and the eagle eye of scrutiny turned to FaceApp in its moment of fame.
It had a privacy agreement that appeared to allow it to do virtually anything it wanted with the photos that users uploaded.
FaceApp and AI Portraits aren’t the only photo transformation apps to attract rapid attention.