Selfie 2 Waifu: Turn Portraits into Anime Versions with AI

We already know that artificial intelligences can create faces out of nothing, draw landscapes, write movies, and even paint nudes. In fact, these days the idea that they'll do anything, as long as they receive the right training, is firmly in place. So, how does turning portraits into anime characters sound? All that the Selfie 2 Waifu portal asks for is a selfie or a photo of someone, and let the AI take care of the rest.

The world still wonders what the real use of artificial intelligences is, and the media doesn't hesitate to expose their most serious errors, but at the same time, we can't stop experimenting with them. We train them to learn, to play, to create. Letting them work unsupervised is usually a bad idea (after all, nobody wants to waste time or hardware cycles), but there's always a new project around the corner, with very interesting results.

The Service That Exploded on Twitter

That brings us to Selfie 2 Waifu. The service debuted in August last year without causing much buzz, but in recent days it has made its way to Twitter, and there it basically exploded. The idea is to use the power of artificial intelligence to turn portraits into their anime equivalents. The site explains that Selfie 2 Waifu is based on the official Tensorflow implementation of U-GAT-IT, an "image-to-image" translation method with unsupervised generative networks.

To be honest, the site has nothing special: you upload the image and wait. Depending on the interpretation the AI makes, you'll get a fairly acceptable anime version, or an aberration. Several comments on Twitter suggest that the system "favors" female faces, but we've seen some pretty good male transformations, though beards seem to be a weak point.

Now, the classic question: What about privacy? Selfie 2 Waifu assures that it doesn't save any selfie, and that any changes will be duly notified. The site's advertising only finances Selfie 2 Waifu's operation, since it depends on several GPUs, and the number of requests is significant. Want to try? The link is below.

Official site: Click here