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peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
trevyn · 2 years ago
What are you using ControlNet for? In my experience it’s trivial to get headshot-framed images.
peteralaoui · 2 years ago
We use it to get consistent results, otherwise only 30% of the generated images have the right composition.

For example, Astria has its own trick to increase the number of headshot in frame, if you download the checkpoint and run it locally you will see that it doesn't handle well negative prompts (which, IMHO, is usually a side effect observed on fine-tuned style models with dreambooth). With this trick you can get up to 70% of headshots in frame but won't reach 100% without risking a loss of prior knowledge. This is my experience so far, maybe you have another opinion based on your experience.

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
xupybd · 2 years ago
I'd love a version of this tool that alters my face enough to avoid it being useful for facial recognition. I don't really want to publish my face on linked in and other sites as I'm not keen on it getting indexed in some future facial recognition tool.
peteralaoui · 2 years ago
@xupybd, cool idea, it could maybe capture the essence of you while still injecting some perturbations into the final rendering to break facial recognition.

If you want to experiment thatwith your photos I'm available on DM: twitter.com/_dulacp

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
sourcecodeplz · 2 years ago
This is definitely the most stupid landing page I've ever seen.

No wonder we have designers, developers, marketers, product managers etc. Proves to show that you can have the best/most amazing product in the world BUT if you can't communicate what it does, it will always fail.

peteralaoui · 2 years ago
You don't relate to the message? I'm curious to know what is the first thing you would change
peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
sdrothrock · 2 years ago
I wonder if you could change this to allow a video input via prompts to turn your head in various angels, like registering for facial recognition. Then it might not trigger the distaste for photos AND you could get better data for face placement.
peteralaoui · 2 years ago
It's a cool idea to simplify the input as you said, though as @dorkwood pointed out this would lead to bad results with a lot of overfitting, this model needs a lot of variation to only register your facial features as "you", and disentangle that from the surroundings or even from your clothes.

(this is due to how this model learns, maybe a future model will alleviate that)

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
neilv · 2 years ago
Interesting application, but I'm confused on the licensing.

> All images produced are released under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license.

How does this work, legally?

Are the rights to the likenesses of the person in these output images being licensed by someone under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license?

If so, to whom is it licensed? And by whom?

peteralaoui · 2 years ago
Hmm to be honest I just reused the most restrictive license of the tools that compose the app.

I guess I should rephrase to something like "The rights of the images are transferred to the user who purchased the service" or hire a lawyer to have it rephrased properly.

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
angry_moose · 2 years ago
For linkedin or Outlook profile type purposes that'll never be seen at higher than ~200x200 I surprisingly don't have a problem with this in theory. I've never seen a corporate headshot photo that doesn't suck anyway and it saves me putting on a suit and taking an awkward photo.

$10 for a "well, maybe the computer will generate something good enough that you like, sorry no refunds" is a big turnoff though.

peteralaoui · 2 years ago
Seeing examples from happy users might help?

Or a refund policy could seal the deal? :)

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
NoPicklez · 2 years ago
Cool idea and I think it has serious uses but these aren't professional headshots, these are borderline emoji's of ourselves.

It would be great if you could adapt the output to be more realistic.

I'm personally not a fan of beautifying our pictures.

peteralaoui · 2 years ago
Thanks, feedback well received! I do have a new pipeline that I'm experimenting with and it's much more realistic (hopefully realistic enough to end this emoji feeling).

If you are interested in trying, we can talk in DM: twitter.com/_dulacp

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
rcarr · 2 years ago
I don’t know if this is what you were already thinking with the movie costume headshots but if this doesn’t work for the business industry you could probably pivot this and aim it at the casting industry so they can get a feel for what actors would look like in costume.
peteralaoui · 2 years ago
Thanks! Great idea. I will probably experiment something.

Allowing some flexibility in the types of costumes might be tricky though (today it's easy because I only allow for a few outfits for "business" looks).

peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
sdwr · 2 years ago
It turns into a "noob trap", where people (at first) see a bunch of perfect profiles and get discouraged, only finding the cracks in the facade if they stick around.
peteralaoui · 2 years ago
What if the cracks were imperceptible in the next iteration or two? Would you still say it's a noob trap? _Genuinely interested in your feedback_
peteralaoui commented on Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI   virtualface.app... · Posted by u/peteralaoui
hn_throwaway_99 · 2 years ago
I usually hate dumping on Show HNs, but given the societal impacts of this, I feel the need to be blunt. Call me old fashioned, call me a luddite, whatever, but I hate this.

So now even our profile pictures aren't really us, but just some pseudo-reality version of who we think we are. And I know I know, people will argue that makeup/airbrushing/photoshop/facetune has been going on forever, but at some point I feel like we cross the line where it's no longer "reality with some touchups", but instead it's "complete fantasy made to mimic reality".

I just feel like AI is shooting us head first down this state where reality and fantasy are evermore difficult to differentiate, and I don't like the implications.

peteralaoui · 2 years ago
It's not the first time that I hear that, thanks for your radical candor :) and to be frank too, I was also sharing that feeling of a fantasy made to mimic reality when I started this project.

It all started when we started to argue with my family members on which avatars looked more like me. It made me realize that we were much more sensitive than I thought about our self-image. Me and my partner would pick different pictures in a set of 10 samples ^^ as if we had two slightly different perceptions of reality.

Now, I changed my mind slightly and tend to see these models as an another type of compression of information. Almost like a new censor of data.

u/peteralaoui

KarmaCake day63March 21, 2023View Original