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Artificial intelligence
Tech

AI-generated portraits from a Hong Kong start-up offer busy professionals an affordable social media upgrade

  • Try It On charges US$17 for 100 AI-generated images based on users’ photos, which are described as good enough to skip a photo shoot
  • The start-up uses a combination of existing products like Stable Diffusion and offers ‘human touch’ fixes for an additional charge

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Artificial intelligence is offering people an easy way to quickly generate new images that they can use to spruce up their online image. Photo: Shutterstock
Dylan Butts
Busy professionals looking to upgrade their LinkedIn profiles without spending time and money on a professional photo shoot may be in luck: artificial intelligence (AI) can now offer cost-effective alternatives.
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This is the burgeoning area that Hong Kong start-up Try It On has entered. The company uses AI technology to generate “professional studio quality headshots” entirely online. Instead of visiting a studio, a user pays US$17 to upload existing photos of themselves to the platform and typically gets a series of AI-generated portraits over the course of the next day.

Lea Schleiff, a student in Essen, Germany, and a cloud solutions consultant at IBM, said she was long overdue for a new profile photo when she saw a post about Try It On on Microsoft’s professional social network LinkedIn.

“I wanted a new headshot, but I didn’t have time to book a studio appointment, find the right outfits, all those things, and it was not high on my priority list,” she said.

South China Morning Post tech reporter Dylan Butts gives Try It On a spin, to varying results. Some images warp features in ways that do not match the original subject, sometimes leaving users with only a few ideal options out of a batch of 100. Photo: Try It On
South China Morning Post tech reporter Dylan Butts gives Try It On a spin, to varying results. Some images warp features in ways that do not match the original subject, sometimes leaving users with only a few ideal options out of a batch of 100. Photo: Try It On

After Schleiff uploaded photos to Try It On, she received 100 AI-generated photos within 24 hours. However, only five of those images were not obviously created by AI, she said.

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