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You've probably seen a very specific set of artificial intelligence (AI) generated photos floating about social media recently.
They look something like this:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
The paid service by Korean photo app SNOW has been gaining traction.
How it works
The user has to upload 10 to 20 photos of themselves "with clear facial features", "from various angles, backgrounds and expressions".
After which, you have to pay either:
- S$2.98 for the standard service, which will take 24 hours to generate
- S$6.98 for the express service, which takes an hour to generate
Twiddle your thumbs for the said amount of time — or slightly more (trust us, bro) — and you'll get 30 AI generated photos of yourself.
In the spirit of investigative journalism, we set out to find out how accurate the AI was.
When we first tried the service on Jun. 21, only the female version was available.
But as of Jun. 29, the male version was made available too.
Because we believe in instant gratification, we went with the more expensive option.
The results
In short, the female version was oddly pretty to a point where we had to take a few steps backwards and squint quite hard for the person in the photo to look remotely familiar.
For example, this photo made me feel like I needed to lose about 10kg and shave my jaw to look remotely similar:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
This one reminded us of what a crypto scammer would use as a display photo:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
And this photo looked a bit like she has mixed ancestory:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
The general consensus was that this looks the most like us, "if we had a face that's half the size it is now":
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
And now, the even more confusing part: the male results.
We're not sure why the AI generator decided to make our eyes noticeably smaller:
And assumed that we like our hair long:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
Apart from the oddly-placed ponytails, there were other dubious hairstyles they picked for us:
One colleague said the black and white photo reminded her a bit of "Winter Sonata guy". Yes, she means Bae Yong Joon — and she's not entirely wrong.
Here's a photo of Bae for reference:
Photo by KeyEast
They also thought we'd like to know what we look like with facial hair:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
However, it wasn't all bad (we guess?) because we got to know what we'd look like as the rich male lead in K-dramas:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
Only one photo made us sad. And that's because he doesn't exist in reality:
Photo from Lee Wei Lin
Was the S$13.96 worth it?
Maybe, because of how entertained we were by the results. But we still want our money back.
Top photos from Lee Wei Lin