Your Next Profile Picture Could Be From… AI?
Does this really help get me more dates?
AI generated images and text are quite a hot topic right now and while people will debate the morality and ethics of creating/using/selling/competing with AI created images and art for the foreseeable future, the technology is out of the bag and it is only going to evolve and spread more.
What started out as a public beta of a handful of AI image generators has already spread to AI creating text in the form of stories, term papers, college admission essays, job applications and even code for solving basic computer programming problems. And this is just the beginning, we are basically at a toddler level of development right now.
I have personally used Midjourney to create some pictures and just mess around to see how well it can translate text to image. It is seriously fun to think of a story or scenario, write it out as a text prompt and have the AI “draw” you pictures in about 30 seconds. You can make some very cool artwork with very little effort (which scares the artists out there).
But how does this all relate to AI and profile pictures?
Using the same technology to create images from text you can also feed it your own images and have it spit out brand new ones. Once the AI knows what you look like and what prompts you want to use to generate new images it can then create backgrounds, clothes, accessories and even facial expressions for any kind of scene you could dream up.
There are even services where all you need to do is pass them a few photos of yourself and they do all the generating for you, so no need to mess around with text prompts yourself trying to get the output images just right. Recently, Lensa AI’s Magic Avatars have been getting a lot of chatter as it does just that. However, the output pictures are more fantasy/anime style and obviously don’t look like a real person, but PhotoAI’s do.
With PhotoAI you pass in about 10 photos of yourself and pick the style you want the output to look like. The LinkedIn pack will make you look all businessy and professional in a suit or dress shirt, the Tinder pack is tuned for dating profiles which apparently means lots of sunglasses and architectural backgrounds. They also have other packs which some are pretty interesting like the Movie pack that puts you in scenes of your favorite movies, the Celebrity pack that makes it look like you took a selfie with a celebrity of your choice and the Meme pack that puts your face in your favorite meme.
"At the end of the day though this is all just automatic Photoshop. Everything PhotoAI outputs could be done in any number of photo editors, but it takes time and skill to make it look good."
This is just a click of a button, wait a couple hours and boom, you have your images. This kind of automation has been happening since robots were first introduced in factories back in the 1950s and now we are up to the point of nearly self-driving cars and trucks, drone deliveries, and watches that monitor your temperature, your heart’s electrical activity and blood oxygen content (I’m still waiting for blood glucose monitoring though).
However, this isn’t to say there aren’t issues with the pictures AI generates. A lot of the programs notoriously struggle with fingers, toes, arm or leg count (e.g. generating a three legged person) and eyes. Remember though, we are dealing with a toddler here, as the technology progresses so do the images it generates just as a human is able to draw better as they grow up (at least for some of us).
So for now, if you want to use one of the AI powered generators just have fun with it. Don’t count on a PhotoAI picture to increase your swipe rights (it may have given you six, seven, eight or nine fingers anyway). Don’t try to trick anyone into thinking you’ve been to Venice by prompting AI to put you into a gondola or Japan by placing you at the top of Mt. Fuji, just be your unique and wonderful self!
Have you used AI to generate anything or maybe tried Lensa AI’s Magic Avatars? What do you think? Share you comments below.
Sam Barris
Columnist | Gaming & Tech Whiz of Moody Melon Magazine
I am a game developer, technical engineer, an animator and entrepreneur with a forward-thinking mindset to bring cool ideas into existence. In my free time I read lots of news articles. I enjoy using my knowledge of the IT world to give my opinions on various tech-related topics.
