‘AI Portraits’ Turns Your Photos Into Old Paintings At The Click Of A Button

Images via Featureflash Photo Agency / Shutterstock.com and AI Portraits

Back in the day, society’s most affluent figures would sit down, and stay still for hours, to have their pictures painted. Today, all you have to do to get a picture is take a selfie.

‘AI Portraits’ does you one better—it can take any portrait and “paint” it in real time at 4k resolution to replicate a Rembrandt or Caravaggio.

The tool—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—is trained on 45,000 images from 15th-century Europe, where realistic portraits gained popularity among people from higher social classes.

Unlike regular style transfers—think those free mobile apps that apply artsy filters on your selfies to create subpar-looking “paintings”—‘AI Portraits’ has been trained to “decide” which style would suit your photo best. “Details of the face and background contribute to direct the model towards a style,” the team explains, as opposed to style transfers, which drastically change colors of existing pictures but rarely alter their styles.

This ensures more realistic “paintings” akin to those from the past, but it also means the shiny whites of subjects get replaced with more somber half-smiles. The ‘AI Portraits’ team explains, via Boing Boing, that painters of the era rarely depicted their sitters with smiles, as smiling and laughing were often reserved for “a more comic aspect of genre painting.”

“This inability of artificial intelligence to reproduce our smiles is teaching us something about the history of art,” they add.



The creators emphasize that all photos submitted to the program’s servers will not be used “for any other purpose, and we’ll immediately delete them.”

To use the free tool, you simply have to upload a headshot and let the AI work its magic. Take a look at some examples and check out ‘AI Portraits’ here.


Images via DFree / Shutterstock.com and AI Portraits


Images via Nicole S Glass / Shutterstock.com and AI Portraits


Images via DFree / Shutterstock.com and AI Portraits


Images via Twocoms / Shutterstock.com and AI Portraits



[via Boing Boing, images via various sources]