In the week that FaceApp went viral, Mauro Martino has updated AIportraits to convert your photos into fine art.

This web-based app uses an AI GAN trained on 54,000 fine art paintings to “paint” your portrait in a style it chooses.

Mauro explains:

“This is not a style transfer. With AI Portraits Ars anyone is able to use GAN models to generate a new painting, where facial lines are completely redesigned. The model decides for itself which style to use for the portrait. Details of the face and background contribute to direct the model towards a style. In style transfer, there is usually a strong alteration of colors, but the features of the photo remain unchanged. AI Portraits Ars creates new forms, beyond altering the style of an existing photo.”

Some samples:

He continues:

“You will not see smiles among the portraits. Portrait masters rarely paint smiling people because smiles and laughter were commonly associated with a more comic aspect of genre painting, and because the display of such an overt expression as smiling can seem to distort the face of the sitter. This inability of artificial intelligence to reproduce our smiles is teaching us something about the history of art. This and other biases that emerge in reproducing our photos with AI Portraits Ars are therefore an indirect exploration of the history of art and portraiture.”

My take: This is a lot of fun! I would love to be able to choose the “artist” though, rather than let the AI choose, based on the background. One thing that does NOT work is to feed it fine art; I tried the Mona Lisa and was terribly disappointed!