Facetune’s AI Image Technology Lets You Create a Selfie in Any Style
A new artificially intelligent (AI) tool allows users to create a selfie of themselves in any style they can think of.
YOUniverse from Facetune harnesses the power of text-to-image generators and the company’s own technology. Facetune’s parent company Lightricks says that it’s the only such product on the market.
Once the app knows what the users look like, they can then type in things like “me as The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland” or “me as Florence Pugh from Midsommar.”
Vice President of Facetune, Alon David, tells PetaPixel how YOUniverse works.
“Lightricks’ YOUniverse creates an artistic model based on a user’s photos and then lets them use simple prompts in our text-to-image feature to create an AI-generated image in different scenes and styles,” David says.
YOUniverse was built around Stable Diffusion, which has an open-source model. Facetune integrated its text-to-image software with Lightrick’s existing computational models and editing apps.
“There’s lots of excitement around AI-image generation, which is still in the early stages of being accessed by the general public,” explains David.
“We’ve been encouraged by the exploration and responses we have seen from our employees — and users who have accessed the tools and tried them out.”
David believes that a new era of image editing is beckoning which will “surely create dramatic changes in photo and video editing.”
“We will be integrating more capabilities as AI evolves into new and even more exciting applications.”
Potential Risks and the Future
One of the concerns around AI image generators is their potential ability to create harmful, explicit images. They can be used to impersonate people via deepfakes. David says they have put NSFW safeguards in place.
“Though we believe it’s best to minimize what might block the creative process, protecting our users is very important to us,” he says.
“We monitor prompts for certain cultural sensitivities in addition to the safeguards implemented by Stable Diffusion.”
AI image generation shows no sign of slowing as more and more applications that harness the technology are made available.
“We believe AI will encourage new tools and capabilities across photo and video creation — supercharging platforms already pushing the envelope in photo and video storytelling,” adds David.
“AI has the ability to empower a new generation of creators who will find it easier to actualize their ideas with these tools. The technology has already advanced in terms of speed, complexity, and depth, and we think there’s still so much creativity to unlock,” he says.
“As noted, we believe we are in a very rare position, at the very start of a technological revolution.”