Turn your selfies into artistic masterpieces

KimKomando AIPortrait

Since we spoiled your fun and told you not to age yourself with this Russian-backed viral app that’s actually harvesting your data, we thought we’d share with you something even better.

What would you look like as a 15th-century subject of a portrait? Well, now you can find out.

A viral website from MIT’s IBM Watson AI Lab called AI Portraits will take your portraits and convert them into artistic images based on famous artists’ work. Based on the image you upload, it will select the style (you don’t get to choose, at least not yet). How good is it? Scroll to the bottom of this post to see if you can recognize the celebrities.

How AI Portraits works

The developers behind AI Portraits Ars focused on 15th-century European artists because it was around this time that individualism became a societal trend. The practice of painting portraits of individuals became a trend.

They used 45,000 portraits to create their artificial intelligence technology.

They encourage you to try several different expressions — smiling, frowning, laughing, looking surprised — to see how the AI renders the image 15th-century style. You’ll note a significant lack of happiness in the portraits — why aren’t smiles recreated? That’s because smiles and laughter at that time were associated with foolishness.

When the website works, it’s a great time waster/distraction. But, it has been so popular, the internet broke it.

AI portraits website is down

Is AI Portraits Ars safe?

We give AIPortraits a thumbs up for safety and privacy. It doesn’t require you to furnish any personal information, and you don’t need to set up an account in order to see your results.

A disclaimer on ARPortraits’ website says it sends your photos to their servers to generate the portraits and then they immediately delete them. They don’t use data from the photos for any other purpose.

Tap or click here to check the site out and have some fun.

Quiz: Can you figure out who these celebrities are?

Ok, now for some fun. See if you can figure out who these famous faces belong to (scroll down for the answers).

A. jack nicholson 15th century 300

B. audrey hepburn 15th century 300

C. robin williams 15th century 300

D. roy scheider 15th century 300

E. janet leigh 15th century 300

F. joaquin phoenix 15th century 300

G. mark hamill 15th century 300

H. miles teller 15th century 300

I. john travolta in the 15th century

J. suraj sharma life of pi actor 15th century

Answers

A. Jack Nicholson

jack nicholson 600

B. Audrey Hepburn

audrey hepburn via aiportraits ars

C: Robin Williams

robin williams 600

D: Roy Scheider (bet you thought it was Sylvester Stallone, huh?), from the original “Jaws”

roy scheider from jaws 600

E: Janet Leigh (“Psycho”)

janet leigh 600

F: Joaquin Phoenix

joaquin phoenix 600

G: Mark Hamill, as he was in the original “Star Wars”

mark hamill 600

H: Miles Teller (whose 15th-century version looks so much like Jonah Hill!)

miles teller aiportrait ars

I. A very young John Travolta as he was in “Grease”

john travolta AIPortrait Ars

J. This is a tough one! It’s Suraj Sharma from “Life of Pi”

suraj sharma life of pi actor

Tags: internet, photos, privacy, Star Wars