By Margherita Cole on August 25, 2021
Nefertiti

Ever wonder what Nefertiti and Michelangelo’s David looked like in real life?

Have you ever wondered what famous historical figures like Nefertiti and Cleopatra looked like in real life? Well, Bas Uterwijk might be able to show you a pretty good guess. The Dutch photographer and digital artist creates amazing AI portraits of famous historical figures using innovative neural network reconstructions. His most recent additions to the ongoing series transport viewers to ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, and 18th-century Europe, among other time periods.

Akhenaten

To create these portraits, Uterwijk uploads numerous references of the person’s likeness to the AI applications. Then, he makes small adjustments to the program until he is satisfied with the result. “These ‘Deep Learning’ networks are trained with thousands of photographs of human faces and are able to create near-photorealistic people from scratch or fit uploaded faces in a ‘Latent Space’ of a total of everything the model has learned,” Uterwijk explains. “I think the human face hasn’t changed dramatically over thousands of years and apart from hairstyles and makeup, people that lived long ago probably looked very much like us, but we are used to seeing them in the often distorted styles of ancient art forms that existed long before the invention of photography.” […]

Mary Shelley

More: Artist Uses AI To Reconstruct Realistic Portraits of Historical Figures