We’re all familiar with the wierd stock photo: women laughing at salads; a nun hanging out with a fish; the hoodie-wearing hacker watching endless Matrix re-runs.
Now, New York-based Icons8 wants to help those seeking images of anonymously handsome people in their presentation, by offering a royalty-free portfolio of 100,000 AI-generated faces; replete with only a few freaky idiosyncrasies.
Many of the images are indistinguishable from stock images of real people. And while AI-generated faces are nothing new, generated.photos aims to provide a usable portfolio of different ages and ethnicities consistently sized for designers.
Getting diverse photos of people for your designs has never been easier.
Download 100K of AI-generated faces, without copyright, totally free.https://t.co/OZtAxPNIDC#photography #ArtificialIntelligence— Icons8 (@icons_8) September 19, 2019
See also: Are Stock Images a Cybersecurity Risk?
Project creator Konstantin Zhabinskiy notes: “All of our training data was shot in-house… No images were pulled from stock media or scraped from the internet. This requires thousands of hours of labor, but in the end we know it will be worth it!
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He added: “These faces feature:
- Consistent lighting
- Consistent sizing
- Range of angles, positions
- Range of facial expressions
- Wide variety of ethnicities
- All ages
- All face shapes
He added: “We are currently working hard to train and refine our generative models toward our ultimate goal: creating a simple API that can produce infinite diversity. We are iterating fast, but things aren’t perfect quite yet. When you see a face that is a bit ‘off’, just give it some slack.”
Naturally Twitter was unlikely to do that, and examples of oddities soon abounded.
no kidding! pic.twitter.com/PN5fkVz1tt
— adamfl⭕️ratorium (@adamflorin) September 19, 2019
Not sure who burned this child with a cigarette 🚬… pic.twitter.com/4npVxlJiEZ
— Sean Biehle (@seanbiehle) September 19, 2019
— “Weird Sisters” Yankovic (@jordandanford) September 19, 2019
The images, while unkindly highlighted by many users and in turn, Computer Business Review (it’s Friday: is that an excuse?), may yet serve a viable commercial purpose and as Icons8’s team note, could expand to provide a unique further feature: the AI model agency. As Icons8 founder Ivan Braun puts it: “You’d be able to 1. Choose an AI model 2. Send us your merchandise: gadgets, clothing, jewelry 3. Receive the photos of it.”
It’s potentially a huge market – once the nightmarish wrinkles are ironed out.
