bas uterwijk uses AI to create portraits of famous historical figures

based in amsterdam, bas uterwijk is a freelance photographer that uses GAN (generative adversarial network) to generate hyper-realistic portraits of famous historical figures. trained with thousands of photographs, these deep learning networks are able to generate photographs that look — at least superficially — genuine to the human eye. from michelangelo’s david and napoleon to the statue of liberty, uterwijk uses artificial intelligence to create photography-type images that might give us an idea of how these people really looked like.

queen elizabeth 
images via bas uterwijk

dubbed the A.I. generated portraits, this series of images by bas uterwijk has been created with artbreeder, an AI software that spots common facial features and qualities from the paintings and statues. the program throws different options for uterwijk to pick from, who then continues with the editing of the image. his approach is somehow artistic as he has to decide on hair and eye color for the statues. as for the paintings, it’s a bit easier as he feeds the AI with different images meaning that the more paintings available on the subject, the more information the artist has to complete the job.

artbreeder’s different options

‘with queen elizabeth, there were many paintings of her,’ said bas uterwijk to yahoo news. ‘so I uploaded 10 different images and then created what I think is a realistic image of how her head would have looked based on an average.’

built on banbreeder and BigGAN, artbreeder is free and freely accessible. the results will vary according to the amount of images you upload. to see more of uterwijk’s work, go to his instagram account here. 

michelangelo’s david

statue of liberty

napoleon

rembrandt

jesus christ

george washington

project info:

name: A.I. generated portraits

created by: bas uterwijk

created with: artbreeder