Swiss AI turns your selfies into perfect app photos

Take some selfies with your smartphone, make sure the scenes are exposed differently, and artificial intelligence can collect very professional portrait photos. Artificial intelligence takes from birth Image creation tools have acquired a new importance in the world of pictures. This photo won Even the famous Sony Pictures Award in April. Images generated by artificial intelligence are becoming less distinct from real ones every day.

An ETH student and startup took image generation models from OpenAI and are now training on professional images. Now they offer a service on their websites that allows you to take a few simple selfies to create the perfect image for your application message for Linkedin or other social networks.

Alexander Eichhorn (24), ETH student

Alexander has had a knack for computer science and application development since his teenage days. By the age of 14, he had already developed an app Other unwanted apps hidden on iPhone. With realfakephotos.com, the EIT student developed a website and iPhone app based on AI for photo generation.

“I’ve always been interested in artificial intelligence,” says Eichhorn. “I was so excited by the idea of ​​an app being able to create professional looking images that I spent most of my free time developing it along with lectures.” During this period, he spent almost more time with the app than with his studies.

So he sat down with two fellow students and trained an AI model for several weeks. To date, more than 8,000 users have used the site. “A very good source of income on the side,” says Alexander. The cost of the service is about ten francs per person.

When asked if photographers do not lose work with this, he said: “I think most photographers do not just work with photos and do many other settings. Our application cannot be used to get a beautiful souvenir photo.

Tobias Meister (30), IT security consultant

Tobias was at ETH and studied computer science there. The guy from Biel is currently working for an IT consulting firm and he also had an idea for such an app. “We wanted to use the idea of ​​creating images commercially, and the goal was to replace expensive photo shoots for professional settings like companies or resumes,” says Meister. That’s why he developed the site with his partner Cyril Imhoff (29). Formalframe.com. They realized that there was a demand for business images that were cheap and created quickly.

And this is how it works: photos or selfies are uploaded and the model is trained with them. It analyzes the face and uses it to create new images in the context of a specific business photograph. The more that is fed in, the more accurate the AI ​​becomes. The two began working on the entertainment project within a few weeks.

On the subject of keeping photographers out of business, Tobias says: “Self-portraits are a small part of a photographer’s job. We cannot generate highly emotional events like weddings. The situation is different for photo situations that are already prepared, such as advertising campaigns or professional photography. Everything is processed later with Photoshop anyway.”

But people still know little about it: “It still needs some clarification because this technology is new,” says the 30-year-old. “It doesn’t get to the masses until later, the whole thing still needs some time.” However, technology is developing very quickly. The app’s developers estimate that AI models will make rapid progress in creating images in just six months.

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