Amidst the popular AI-based Faceapp and its alternatives trending all over social media, there exists this website named AI Portraits that changes your image to an artistic portrait. The project is an effort of researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

The researchers have used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in AI Portraits that is trained from over 45,000 portrait images. The website states that GAN is composed of two neural networks – one for recognizing the portraits while the other is used for generating portraits.

They have also made it clear that AI Portraits is not just a style transfer tool. AI Portraits have the ability to generate the painting by modifying the facial lines to suit a style for the portrait. Style selection for portraits is automated and is done by the AI and will vary depending upon the input image & the face features of the user’s image.

Since the AI is trained on ancient portrait images, getting output with a smiling face is highly unlikely. This phenomenon occurs because artists back in the day considered that smiling faces belonged to the comic genre and were not considered as poses for portraits. You may check these images here to get an idea of ancient portraits. I tried running a picture of PewDiePie’s face on the website and take a look at the result I got below.

Learning from the privacy allegations faced by Faceapp, AI Portraits have explicitly mentioned on the website their take on privacy. “Your photos are sent to our servers to generate portraits. We won’t use data from your photos for any other purpose and we’ll immediately delete them.”, reads the privacy policy of AI Portraits.

Since no data is stored on their servers, we would recommend you to check out AI Portraits today. Also, don’t forget to share your experience with us in the comments.