Can AI Create a Self-Portrait of You?
There's Only One Way to Find Out
On a whim, I decided to see what AI would come up with if I directed it to create a self-portrait of me (don’t try this at home, kids; actually, do try this at home — if you want to, that is).
I used the prompt/description “self-portrait by b. clay shannon”
Since I have no self-portraits of myself on the interwebs (I’m not a graphic artist), the AI robot had to (I assume) find photos of me that are “out there in the wild (in cyberspace, that is)” and guess what it would look like if I painted a self-portrait. Here’s what AI came up with:
These renditions are somewhat impressive, as I think they do look a bit like me (except, for the most obvious boo-boo, my hair is now silver rather than its former brown). To create these, the AI robot probably used images of me available on the internet, as well as, it seems, the videos of me reading my novel Taterskin & The Eco Defenders, which are posted on this site.
AI got the fact that I have a beard right, also that I wear specs (since reading Lord of the Flies, I have always referred to prescription glasses as “specs” [spectacles]), and my basic face shape and hair style are accurate, too. However, they only got my eye color right in the middle picture. All in all, not bad for a robot.
OTOH, when I tried having AI create portraits of myself using my nom de guerre (Blackbird Crow Raven), it couldn’t figure that out, even though there are several books of mine available online with that as the author name (with my picture on the back cover). So, that was an AI fail, as it conjured up images like this:
