Social media pros know how important the selfie is to generating likes and comments. Nothing is worse to our self-esteem than posting a photo we think we look close to perfect in and it not getting the love we thought it deserved.
Of course, there is an art to snapping your best selfie, such as trying different angles, lighting and cropping the photo in an interesting way, but this neural network artificial intelligence will help you step your selfie game up to the next level.
Standford doctoral candidate Andrej Karpathy has trained an AI to determine which selfies are good and bad based on the amount of likes the photos received.
Karpathy, who has worked with Google Research and DeepMind, a Britsih AI company, used a convoluted neural network (ConvNets), which is the most common type of AI when working with images since it can recognize people in photos, as well as recognizing objects and places.
To determine which selfies are "good," he searched for the photos using #selfie to show the AI 2 million different images. The researcher fed the AI with data about which ones were better than others depending on the number of likes they received. After the system had a million "good" and "bad" selfies, Karpathy then gave the AI 50,000 previously unseen images and made it rank them.
The AI found that selfies snapped by women were consistently ranked higher than those snapped by men, with not one male making the top 100. More specifically, women with long hair who slightly tilt their head so that the top edge of the frame cuts out part of their forehead were ranked high on the list.
The perfect selfie was found to be one that uses a filter, has oversaturated lighting on your face, and includes a border. Your face should occupy about one-third of the image, making sure it's slightly tilted.
While these rules apply for females, the highest-ranking male selfies had different results. Men shouldn't cut off their foreheads, and should instead show off a fancy hair style such as combing their hair up and backwards. They should also make sure to include their shoulders, take the selfie straight on, and refrain from oversaturating their face.
Of course, there are some things you should definitely not do in your selfie. These include taking your photo in low lighting, making your head appear too big, or taking a photo with a large group.
Want to see how your selfie ranks? You can tweet your photo to the AI's Twitter bot, @deepselfie, that says it has a 60 percent accuracy rate, and will give you your results in less than a minute.
Source: Andrej Karpathy
