A huge percentage of ads both in print and online use portraits of someone who is using or endorsing the product or service in the add.
Shutterstock has 134,636 headshots in its collection and
AdobeStock has 156,560. Many of these individual frames show 16 to 25 different headshots in the frame so the total variations is much greater.
Alamy has 107,506 women and 62,011 men headshots.
Getty has a total of 1,156,443 images with the keyword “headshot.”
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the near future customers will no longer need to license any of these images Customers looking for convincing-looking, FREE photos of people that they can use anyway they want, as often as they want and are guaranteed not to have model-release problems will be able to get everything they need from
Icons8.com.
Icons8 is offering a resource of 100,000 AI-generated faces to anyone that can use them — royalty free. Many of the images look fake but others are difficult to distinguish from images licensed by stock photo companies. Everything is free to use with link attribution back to
generated.photos.
The project is in its early stages, and Icons8 product designer Konstantin Zhabinskiy notes that some of the faces might look a bit “off.” However, the team’s hope is to eventually produce a simple API that can easily generate new photographs based on a variety of inputs, allowing designers to quickly produce photorealistic images to illustrate their work without having to worry about copyright or model releases.
To train the AI algorithm it is necessary to show the software a significant number of real images. Ivan Braun, the founder of Icons8, says that in total the team took 29,000 pictures of 69 models over the course of three years. Zhabinskiy emphasized that no stock images or images scraped from the Internet were used for this purpose. “Such an approach requires thousands of hours of labor, but in the end, it will certainly be worth it!” he said.
Another AI project is
ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, created by Philip Wang, a software engineer at Uber. The site is capable of producing an infinite series of mostly-believable headshots and uses research
released last year by chip designer Nvidia to create an endless stream of fake portraits. The algorithm behind it is trained on a huge dataset of real images, then uses a type of neural network known as a
generative adversarial network (or GAN) to fabricate new examples.