Google Teases AI To Produce ‘Endless Selfies’—So You’ll Never Snap Another Again

Photo 202899685 © Roman Samborskyi | Dreamstime.com

If you’re camera-shy or absolutely loathe taking selfies, a new artificial-intelligence tool that the Google Research and Boston University teams are working on could be your saving grace.

Google’s secretive project is called DreamBooth, which is trained to churn out an infinite stream of realistic images based on a set of photos. That means you’ll never have to snap pictures of yourself again, if that’s what you prefer.

While the technology was first presented last year, Google Creative Lab vice president Robert Wong brought it up again at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, touting it as a tool to make the exhausting art of posing in front of the camera a thing of the past.

Chiming in, James Manyika—Google’s senior vice president of research, technology, and society—likened the wave of generative artificial intelligence to the inception of the camera.

“When photography first arrived, many worried it signaled the end of art because it threatened to disrupt significant areas of work, like landscape painting and portraiture,” Manyika proclaimed at the event, as quoted by Fortune.

“However, in many ways the opposite turned out to be true. Freed from the need to accurately reproduce reality, painters went to new places leading to the rise of impressionism, modernism, and so much more.”

The Google Research team says it’s been playing around with the machine to generate endless selfies among themselves.

[via PetaPixel and Fortune, cover photo 202899685 © Roman Samborskyi | Dreamstime.com]