It may not have broken the Internet, but it's outgrowing its domain: The website was down for hours Wednesday.
Developed by researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, AI Portraits uses dueling neural networks to produce a generator that"looks at examples and tries to mimic them," according to the MIT Technology Review. The program does have a basic blind spot, the MIT Technology Review says: Because smiling was rare in Renaissance portraits, the AI has a hard time showing your glee if you put in a smiling selfie.AI Portraits works differently from FaceApp, which drew skepticism for its privacy policy and for having been developed in Russia.
All tech companies deal with deep concerns over how they handle user data, and the eagle eye of scrutiny turned to FaceApp in its moment of fame.