Now mankind can see what Tutankhamun, Elizabeth I, Mozart and other famous people looked like.
Dutch artist and photographer Bas Otterwijk has used artificial intelligence to create photo-realistic portraits of famous historical figures.
He published his work on the official website and on Instagram.
Bas Uterwijk claims to have used an innovative technique to reconstruct the image using a neural network. His most recent work shows what famous people from ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, and Europe might have looked like in the eighteenth century and other historical eras. The Dutchman sells some of his work as unique NFT tokens.
To create selfies, Uterwijk collects a lot of data about a person’s appearance and uploads it to AI software. Then the artist makes small changes to the “painting” until he is satisfied with the end result. It not only recreates real-life celebrities, but also recreates characters drawn by artists from the past, including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The artist even created a portrait of Juliet from a William Shakespeare play.
“These networks of ‘deep learning’ (deep learning) train using thousands of photographs of human faces and can create realistic images from scratch,” Uterwijk quotes the website of My Modern Met.
The photographer believes that over the past thousand years, human faces have not changed significantly, except, perhaps, for hairstyles and makeup. People who lived several centuries ago may have been very similar to modern people, yet we are used to seeing them somewhat distorted in images created before the invention of photography.
“Just as photography changed the form of classical painting, AI-based technologies will begin to influence art. AI applications are developing at an amazing rate, and this will affect virtually every segment of our society,” Ottervik said.
Previously, scientists were the first to give artificial intelligence a fantasy similar to the human imagination. He learned to highlight the individual characteristics of objects and create images that he had never seen before.
Recently, the Chinese AliceMind AI outperformed humans in pattern recognition for the first time. It turned out to be 1% more accurate than direct participants when analyzing 250 thousand photos.
Before that, a revolutionary artificial intelligence system had learned to predict the structure of human proteins. In the future, this will help scientists reveal the secrets of DNA and bring about a breakthrough in medicine.
