Roman Rey

A gallery of six AI generated portraits of Roman Rey

An AI Created 112 Portraits of Me – It’s Quite Uncanny

Posted on Author RomanPosted in Technology

One day last week, I got up early, started brewing some coffee and sat down at my desk to write. And then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes uploading 20 photos of me from different angles so an Artificial Intelligence (AI) could generate 112 portraits of me.

The morning didn’t go as planned, and the whole thing cost me 40 dollars, but I just couldn’t help myself. After I saw some people post their AI Avatars, I had to know what the machine could come up with for me. Oh well, I’ll charge it off my guilty pleasures account.

So how did they turn out? I invite you to have a look for yourself, I uploaded them all in a Facebook gallery (including the source photos). Let me know what you think.

I think they roughly fall into three categories: The good, the awkward and the ugly.

The Good

These are pretty awesome, I have to say. Even though they look a bit artificial, they are still me, they capture my expression, my smile, my patchy beard, my … essence? It’s very fun to see myself in these different contexts and clothes that I never have been in.

Portrait of me as a painting, looking down and holding a sunflower in my hand.
Portrait of me in some sort of old style uniform and an eccentric moustache.
Portrait of me with a ponytail of pink strings protruding from the back of my head.
Cartoonish portrait of me with a space background, wearing dapper clothing and jack-o-lantern fused to my hat.
Portrait of me staring into the void, looking like a member of the Beatles who was rejected from a meditation retreat.
Those turned out quite well.

The Awkward

A whole bunch of these images miss the mark by a very narrow margin – which makes them quite strange. I think we’re entering the Uncanny Valley of Roman Rey here. The Uncanny Valley describes how we feel about artificial characters. When they’re on either end of the human-likeness spectrum – so either actual humans or barely resembling them, like industrial robots, we tend to feel good about them. When they’re almost human but are not, however, our curve of sympathy for them sharply drops – into the Uncanny Valley. Examples of this are humanlike dolls or 3D computer animations.

Or quite weird AI-generated portraits from your photos.

Portrait of me, cross-eyed, intensely staring, wearing a bow-tie.
Portrait of me staring straight into the camera with a wider, fuller face.
Portrait of not quite me, smiling at the camera.
Portrait of not quite me
Portrait of not quite me
Those turned out quite awkward.

The Ugly

Quite a few miss the mark by a lot. They don’t look like me at all, and I don’t understand why, when some of the other images turned out so well. Seems like it’s still a bit hit or miss.

I wonder if the creator gave the AI some prompts, like generating some holiday or Halloween-themed images, and maybe some mad max and fantasy ones? Those were the worst and seemed to draw a big part of their inspiration from other sources than the photos that I uploaded.

Some sort of Christmas elf that doesn't look like me at all.
A man and a woman with Santa hats in front of a Christmas tree, neither looking like me.
A mad max style photo, a guy in ragged clothing in a desert with a big gun in his hand. Doesn't look like me.
Fantasy style image, a man in a golden armour carrying a glowing sword.
A man in a white jacket standing in front of a waterfall, doesn't look like me at all.
Those turned out quite ugly.

Further Thoughts

A few years ago I played a video game called Choice of Robots. It’s a text-based interactive novel where you have to make a lot of choices that have direct effects on the story. It was so well done and so much more fun than I expected. I played it through several times with vastly different outcomes.

What fascinated me was the depth and relevance of the questions that arose during the plot. In one scenario I fell in love with the robot that I created and had to fight to be able to marry … her? it? I think we ended up moving to Canada, where it was legal already. In a different scenario, I trained my robot so well in the arts that it became a better visual artist not only than me but than any human on earth. I distinctly remember the weird feeling of accomplishment on the one hand, and the – oh shit, what does this mean now? on the other. We are fine outsourcing the jobs on the assembly line to robots, and maybe even some office jobs. But the arts? That’s our domain. What if we lose our hegemony there?

I have a similar feeling now, and it feels like walking through a big, big Uncanny Valley. Artificial Intelligence seems to have reached a point where it is competing with humans in domains we wouldn’t have thought possible recently. The AI programs GPT-3 and DALL-E2, which came out this year, can generate excellent texts and images based on the prompts that you give them.

When I look at my portraits, I get the strangest emotion not when I look at the awkward or bad ones, but the ones that have turned out well. It’s again this mix of amazement and worry. What does it mean when I computer can just generate realistic images of anybody in any scenario?

I suppose this is the moment where I decide to be optimistic and see the vast potential of all this. To be mindful of the risks, but also think about all the potential that this offers. For a while, I probably won’t be able to do that without a queasy feeling though.

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