D Why are Eli Gallen's portraits so popular Done 1.5
Wonk sees an add for Eli's portraits while hanging out with Guy. I see these ads a lot, how do you suppose he got so popular?
Everyone likes pictures of themselves, Wonk, at least that's what they say.
I don't. I don't think I look right, don't like the sound of my voice when I'm recorded, either.
She loves pictures of herself, Guy pointed out.
Yeah I have to agree with you, Yolanda does. Do you think it's fashion, a passing fad, something new, possibly related to social media?
No not really, Guy answered. Artists painted self-portraits long before the camera, long before social media. And the well off commissioned portraits. It's part of basic human nature. But we want to look good. Though looking good is very subjective.
I think we have some mental image of what we look like. If the photo doesn't match our image, we think its wrong, or it's a bad photo.
OK Wonk said, Why do you think Eli is so successful?
Well, Eli did something pretty smart. He offered his master's filter of a picture of yourself for free. He started with friends until he started producing passable results. And then he managed to get people using it that are influencers, Otters.
They shared their experience with the program. They wrote blogs and magazine articles. And that resulted in more people using the product. Eli only measured a few things. The first thing he measured was deletes. If you uploaded a photo and you didn't like it, you deleted it so nobody would see it. Eli kept a record of all of the input photos submitted, and the output products that were deleted. He used those to teach the machine what not to do, lowered the priority of those paths.
He also had a like system. If you went to the gallery and looked through the pictures then you could click like. Certainly not a new trick, but effective, that is why people are still doing it. Then Eli could use the pictures that have the most likes to train the system to prioritize the paths that tended to be successful. But he went a step further, he used things like: the amount of time people spent looking at the picture, did they enlarge it, did they try to down load it. That info was used to train the AI to recognize and create high arousal images, thought provoking, creative, striking, something you would like to own.
OK, said Wonk, why did people want to publish the pictures so the world could see them? Why didn't they keep them all private?
Well until you have published your first public picture, you can't create a second one. People would look at the gallery and that effect is really exciting, I want one with that effect. And people with more likes had access to more tools, more resolution. So if you just wanted one portrait, medium resolution, no reason to set the access to public.
But a group of users started taking it really seriously and they created some great stuff, volunteer AI tenders basically. And of course the AI is learning, many people feel it is an accomplished artist in its own right. By the time Eli took his product commercial, he had run hundreds of thousands of photos.
I've seen his stuff, it's not all old masters. Right, and Eli saw that one coming a kilometer off. He monitored the filters that were submitted. The users that had enough likes were allowed to submit a picture that the AI would use as a filter. They tried everything under the sun, moon, and stars. Their success rate wasn't that high at first, but over time they and the AI learned.
The crazy thing was when the AI church started using it. They bought a site license. Their AI analyzed the inputs and outputs and members are assigned individual filters. The use their portraits on their business cards, web pages, advertisements and so forth, you've probably seen them. There's even a scanner app for a Q phone to read the embedded information. You want to see mine?
You have an AI church portrait, I thought you were agnostic?
Couple of the Net Girls and I went, we just wanted to see what was going on. I made a donation and that made me a member, so the AI created a filter for me. I used that photo of me in a suit in my dad's office.
Long story short, very few people still want to old school master's style anymore. You still see some Van Gogh or Picasso filters, but these days, people are chasing fresh new looks.
Wonk looked at "Guy's portrait", that's not you, that's President Clinton. I know, Guy said sheepishly, I don't like pictures of myself, so I used this one.
Everyone likes pictures of themselves, Wonk, at least that's what they say.
I don't. I don't think I look right, don't like the sound of my voice when I'm recorded, either.
She loves pictures of herself, Guy pointed out.
Yeah I have to agree with you, Yolanda does. Do you think it's fashion, a passing fad, something new, possibly related to social media?
No not really, Guy answered. Artists painted self-portraits long before the camera, long before social media. And the well off commissioned portraits. It's part of basic human nature. But we want to look good. Though looking good is very subjective.
I think we have some mental image of what we look like. If the photo doesn't match our image, we think its wrong, or it's a bad photo.
OK Wonk said, Why do you think Eli is so successful?
Well, Eli did something pretty smart. He offered his master's filter of a picture of yourself for free. He started with friends until he started producing passable results. And then he managed to get people using it that are influencers, Otters.
They shared their experience with the program. They wrote blogs and magazine articles. And that resulted in more people using the product. Eli only measured a few things. The first thing he measured was deletes. If you uploaded a photo and you didn't like it, you deleted it so nobody would see it. Eli kept a record of all of the input photos submitted, and the output products that were deleted. He used those to teach the machine what not to do, lowered the priority of those paths.
He also had a like system. If you went to the gallery and looked through the pictures then you could click like. Certainly not a new trick, but effective, that is why people are still doing it. Then Eli could use the pictures that have the most likes to train the system to prioritize the paths that tended to be successful. But he went a step further, he used things like: the amount of time people spent looking at the picture, did they enlarge it, did they try to down load it. That info was used to train the AI to recognize and create high arousal images, thought provoking, creative, striking, something you would like to own.
OK, said Wonk, why did people want to publish the pictures so the world could see them? Why didn't they keep them all private?
Well until you have published your first public picture, you can't create a second one. People would look at the gallery and that effect is really exciting, I want one with that effect. And people with more likes had access to more tools, more resolution. So if you just wanted one portrait, medium resolution, no reason to set the access to public.
But a group of users started taking it really seriously and they created some great stuff, volunteer AI tenders basically. And of course the AI is learning, many people feel it is an accomplished artist in its own right. By the time Eli took his product commercial, he had run hundreds of thousands of photos.
I've seen his stuff, it's not all old masters. Right, and Eli saw that one coming a kilometer off. He monitored the filters that were submitted. The users that had enough likes were allowed to submit a picture that the AI would use as a filter. They tried everything under the sun, moon, and stars. Their success rate wasn't that high at first, but over time they and the AI learned.
The crazy thing was when the AI church started using it. They bought a site license. Their AI analyzed the inputs and outputs and members are assigned individual filters. The use their portraits on their business cards, web pages, advertisements and so forth, you've probably seen them. There's even a scanner app for a Q phone to read the embedded information. You want to see mine?
You have an AI church portrait, I thought you were agnostic?
Couple of the Net Girls and I went, we just wanted to see what was going on. I made a donation and that made me a member, so the AI created a filter for me. I used that photo of me in a suit in my dad's office.
Long story short, very few people still want to old school master's style anymore. You still see some Van Gogh or Picasso filters, but these days, people are chasing fresh new looks.
Wonk looked at "Guy's portrait", that's not you, that's President Clinton. I know, Guy said sheepishly, I don't like pictures of myself, so I used this one.
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