Faces of Hitty

You may have heard of AI (Artificial Intelligence), but have you ever thought of using it to create a portrait of Hitty? To celebrate Hitty’s birthday (officially designated as January 22, 1820), I made a 3D sculpture of Hitty’s head in Zbrush Core. I started with a basic shape and kept making adjustments until the model looked like my vision of Hitty. I paid particular attention to her signature curls. Then I added colors and textures to the sculpt with digital paintbrushes. The result took me four days to do. Admittedly, I am not an expert, and someone more experienced could have completed it in half the time.

The image was a good start, but it still needed something… more personality. I wanted to see how far I could enhance the image using AI. When I found an app called, “Dzine” (pronounced like “design”) which looked promising, I decided to try it. The free version allowed 32 credits per day for designing. Each new image took a four or eight credits to generate, so I was limited in how many I could do. Even with those limitations, I was able to make some amazing images! I hope you enjoy seeing the results.

READ FIRST: AI ETHICS

Using AI to make images seems amazing and wonderful, but it comes with a downside. Every AI algorithm relies on a database of images, many of which are copyrighted. Often, the artists have not given permission to use these images. Worse, they are not compensated in any way. AI can quickly learn to imitate an artist’s style and subject matter, which may have taken many years to develop and cultivate.

As a digital artist, I rely on computers to do my work. But I believe there is a difference between making art on the computer and stealing the work of other artists. Art created by machines from stolen images just doesn’t sound ethical to me.

AI seems poised to eliminate many of the entry level art jobs. However, they will still need some artists at least in the short term to “clean up” these AI creations. And it might actually create more jobs for artists, or at least increase their productivity. I don’t know what the future will bring, but I am hopeful that we will find a way to compensate artists fairly for their work. And then we can all benefit from the technology.

Since I wasn’t selling anything and all my images were public, I didn’t feel guilty about using AI. Rather, I am hopeful that these “faces of Hitty” will attract new Hitty admirers.

DZine’s Image-to-Image Tool

I used DZine’s “Image-to-Image” tool which uses different “styles” to enhance an image. If you want to see how it works, you can watch this video about “How to stylize images with AI.” Each image also included a text description to help the AI interpret the photo. Then four new images were generated, with slight variations. The first description I used was, “young girl with blue eyes and black hair parted in the center and sausage curls.” That was a mistake, because as you can see, one of the images actually had a sausage next to her hair!

*“Realistic” style added a real sausage!*

The results for each style took less than a minute to generate. Below are some of my favorite faces of Hitty. Which style is your favorite? Please take my poll, and I will announce the winner at the end of the month.