Free AI-generated headshots put stock photo companies on notice
I used to fancy myself a starving artist (emphasis on "starving").<p>These pictures suffer from a common newbie-artist problem!<p>One of the concepts of early stage drawing I noticed is "symbol drawing". This is where a person knows how an eye should look, and where an eye should go on the face, and so draws an eye on a face-shaped oval. They repeat this for the other eye, a nose, a mouth, etc. They are often sad with the results.<p>A person who practices incorrectly will try to do photorealistic eyes, noses, mouths, etc but use the same 2D composition technique. No matter how realistically they can render components, their composition is off because they are ignoring the <i>structure</i> of a face that causes subtle differences in the shape of each of the components <i>when projected onto a sheet of paper</i>.<p>Our mind is so capable of 3D modelling that when we look at a face we don't notice the changes in perspective leading to changes in component shape and shading. The great artist skill is to build up those 3D to 2D projections and avoid the 2D composition (except in stylistic choices).<p>I suspect that the networks rendering these faces, and the underlying biological phenomena they are designed against, are "symbol" recognizers, rather than "structural" recognizers.