Swiss AI service
This app turns your selfies into perfect app photos
Both an ETH student and a startup provide a service for professional selfies. It was created by artificial intelligence. In the future, these applications can replace the work of photographers.
published
Other Swiss startups are also using AI for new products: one company has launched a new AI brew.
20 m / Tariq Al-Sayed
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An ETH student and startup create AI models that generate images for the app.
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These were created within a few weeks.
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With 10 to 15 selfies, more than a hundred images are generated automatically.
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The service could replace expensive professional photo sessions in the future.
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
The 24-year-old says Alexander spent more time developing apps than studying.
Alexander Eichorn
Portraits like this…
Alexander Eichorn
… become professional photos for social media, for example.
Alexander Eichhorn / Produced by Amnesty International
The AI also creates more serious portrayals here of Alexander. Suit included.
Alexander Eichhorn / Produced by Amnesty International
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
This is what Tobias Meister looks like in his app image – generated by artificial intelligence.
tobias meister / created by AI
In it he fed pictures like this.
Tobias Master
His partner, Cyril Imhoff, also developed the web application with him.
Cyril Imhoff
This is how the whole AI thing looks.
tobias meister / created by AI
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.
Here are more AI-generated selfies. Do you realize that artificial intelligence created these?
Tobias Master
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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