When Lensa, a four-year-old photo-editing app, introduced a new AI-portrait generator in November, the internet was enthralled. But concerns have mounted, particularly among women
Last week, after seeing artsy portraits popping up all over her social media feeds, Christal Luster signed up for a free trial of a photo-editing app called Lensa. She uploaded 10 of her headshots to it and paid $5.99 for 100 new images based on her inputs, which an artificial-intelligence tool produced in under an hour.
Ms. Luster, an actress in Chicago, said the images opened her eyes to the types of characters she could portray. “There was one of them where I was like, ‘Oh I could totally see myself playing in ‘Bridgerton.’ I could learn to speak with a British accent. I could do period pieces,” she said. Others made her look like a superhero, she said: “I could be in the next ‘Black Panther.’” She shared some of the portraits in a video on TikTok, where she has more than 480,000 followers. Read More
Tag Archives: Image Recognition
This AI Time Machine Transforms You Into A Historical Figure From Any Era
If your social media profile photo needs some zhuzhing up, this AI image generator can turn your selfies and portraits into timeless works of art.
Apps that are designed to produce highly creative imagery through artificial intelligence (AI) are certainly having a moment these days, as another one designed to turn users into prominent people from the past is making the rounds online. Most AI art generators use text-to-image technology that requires user input to determine the artistic direction of rendered photographs. AI art generation is now a mainstay in the zeitgeist, thanks to the likes of DALL-E, an open-source project that inspired many others, which people started using to produce hilarious memes.
Soon after DALL-E’s rise to fame, more platforms that cater to producing hyperrealistic images from descriptive text prompts, including Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, came out of the woodwork and have since attracted sizable user bases. … AI Time Machine is an entertaining new feature that’s currently free to try on MyHeritage, an online genealogy platform. It works by taking a collection of photos depicting a single person and turning them into themed portraits seemingly captured from different points in history. Read More
NVIDIA Omniverse Shines in a New Light with Magic3D
NVIDIA’s new text-to-3D synthesis model Magic3D creates high-quality 3D mesh models better than Google’s DreamFusion
Earlier this month, NVIDIA announced that it would be enabling the beta release of Omniverse, a platform where developers and creators can build Metaverse applications. In this way, the company has aligned its future along the metaverse vision, with the new platform allowing its users to create “digital twins” to simulate the real world.
One such step towards the realisation of such a dream that would help users to render a high-resolution 3D model for any 2D image input, or textual prompt, is Magic3D. Recently released by NVIDIA researchers, Magic3D is a text-to-3D synthesis model that creates high-quality 3D mesh models.
The model is a response to Google’s DreamFusion, in which the team used a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, circumventing the impossibility of having large-scale labelled 3D datasets, to optimise Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Read More
AI Can Now Make Fake Selfies For Your Tinder Profile
Get ready to swipe right on some AI-generated profile pics.
The AI image-generating craze has entered its next phase of absurdity: creating fake profile pics that make you look good on dating apps and social media.
For $19, a service called PhotoAI will use 12-20 of your mediocre, poorly-lit selfies to generate a batch of fake photos specially tailored to the style or platform of your choosing. The results speak to an AI trend that seems to regularly jump the shark: A “LinkedIn” package will generate photos of you wearing a suit or business attire, while the “Tinder” setting promises to make you “the best you’ve ever looked”—which apparently means making you into an algorithmically beefed-up dudebro with sunglasses. Read More
DeviantArt Has a Plan to Keep Its Users’ Art Somewhat Safe From AI Image Generators
The art hosting site is releasing its own AI art system called DreamUp, and users can decide if they want to let their work be picked up by the system.
The year of our lord 2022 could be accurately described as the rise of AI. Instead of Skynet raining fire on our heads, we have AI image generators creating a different kind of apocalypse, especially for artists who promote their work online. So far, few have tried to answer how creators can actually respond to systems that scrape their work from the internet, using art to create new works without offering them any credit.
On Friday, DeviantArt released its new DreamUp AI art generator. Based on the existing Stable Diffusion AI model, this new system will actively tag their images as AI and will even credit which creators it used to create the image when they’re published on the DeviantArt site. Read More
When AI can make art – what does it mean for creativity?
When the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021’s Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later.
The internet revelled in the meme-making opportunities, with a Twitter account documenting “weird Dall-E generations” racking up more than a million followers. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world’s first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of “generative AI”. The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google’s Imagen Video and Meta’s Make-A-Video.
But AI’s new artistic prowess wasn’t received so ecstatically by some creatives. “The main concern for me is what this does to the future of not just my industry, but creative human industries in general,” says Palmer. Read More
AI Drew This Gorgeous Comic Series, But You’d Never Know It
The Bestiary Chronicles is both a modern fable on the rise of artificial intelligence and a demonstration of how shockingly fast AI is evolving.
You might expect a comic book series featuring art generated entirely by artificial intelligence technology to be full of surreal images that have you tilting your head trying to grasp what kind of sense-shifting madness you’re looking at.
Not so with the images in The Bestiary Chronicles, a free, three-part comics series from Campfire Entertainment, an award-winning New York-based production house focused on creative storytelling. Read More
AI, Artists, and the Future of Images
An Introduction to Vilém Flusser, and thoughts on on AI art
In recent months, AI text-to-image artworks have been flooding the internet, releasing a deluge of discourse around the role of artists in a rapidly changing world. I’ve recently been revisiting the 1985 book Into the Universe of Technical Images by Vilém Flusser, a philosopher and media theorist who I first encountered in the context of film, but turns out to be shockingly relevant to the current wave of AI image models and the questions they raise about creativity, art, and labor. A close reading of Flusser’s prophetic text can help to answer some of these questions, and to clarify the role of artists in the fast-approaching future.
In broad strokes, Flusser’s account of cultural history can be summed up:
From traditional images (2D art images made by hand, like cave paintings),
to linear texts (i.e. written language works, like the Bible),
to technical images (images created mechanically by an apparatus, like a photograph). Read More
Google’s text-to-image AI model Imagen is getting its first (very limited) public outing
Google is being extremely cautious with the release of its text-to-image AI systems. Although the company’s Imagen model produces output equal in quality to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, Google hasn’t made the system available to the public.
Today, though, the search giant announced it will be adding Imagen — in a very limited form — to its AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology.
AI Test Kitchen was launched earlier this year as a way for Google to beta test various AI systems. Currently, the app offers a few different ways to interact with Google’s text model LaMDA (yes, the same one that the engineer thought was sentient), and the company will soon be adding similarly constrained Imagen requests as part of what it calls a “season two” update to the app. In short, there’ll be two ways to interact with Imagen, which Google demoed to The Verge ahead of the announcement today: “City Dreamer” and “Wobble.” Read More
Prompt Engineering: Future of AI or Hack?
Is prompt engineering — the art of writing text prompts to get an AI system to generate the output you want — going to be a dominant user interface for AI? With the rise of text generators such as GPT-3 and Jurassic and image generators such as DALL·E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which take text input and produce output to match, there has been growing interest in how to craft prompts to get the output you want. For example, when generating an image of a panda, how does adding an adjective such as “beautiful” or a phrase like “trending on artstation” influence the output? The response to a particular prompt can be hard to predict and varies from system to system. Read More
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