Turn Yourself into a Funny Renaissance Painting

After the spike in downloads of entertainment apps and virtual tours, artificial intelligence programmes are next. The latest viral favourite? AI Gahaku, an online tool that, according to its website, turns human portraits into ‘canvas Renaissance paintings’. 

Truth be told, some of the results are more in the 19th-century Realism and Impressionist styles. Nevertheless, it’s a fun wait to see how AI, without resorting to filters, transforms the pixels in your photos into ye olde brush strokes. The algorithm picks up faces in pictures, and then presents final options in different artistic styles and colours. Here’s how our team fared:

We've definitely seen better days.

Many of the results on AI Gahaku have drawn flak for not being diverse enough. Japanese web developer Sato Neet (@sato_neet on Twitter), the lady behind the portal, has recognised the programme’s bias, and is working to improve the output for people with darker skin tones. It’s likely the database of paintings fed into the programme was Eurocentric, which led to the bias in machine learning.

AI Gahaku has become exceedingly popular on Twitter, and Sato is now taking Patreon donations to improve and maintain the website. For those with privacy concerns, she has stated that all uploaded pictures are automatically deleted from the server. 

If you want to generate fun images for icons, Sato’s pixel art website does a better job. All in all, AI Gahaku is not the most accurate AI program out there. But if you’re looking for a hilarious break, try your luck on ai-art.tokyo/en.