Google app turns your photos into famous artworks using artificial intelligence

Tool includes dozens of different famous artworks

Andrew Griffin
Thursday 02 April 2020 16:07 BST
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A woman takes a selfie in front of part of a series of nine panels titled "Untitled I-IX" by American painter Cy Twembly
A woman takes a selfie in front of part of a series of nine panels titled "Untitled I-IX" by American painter Cy Twembly

Google's Art & Culture app will now let you turn any of your pictures into a masterpiece.

The new feature, called "Art Transfer", takes your photo and uses artificial intelligence to give it the style of a famous artwork.

Users can choose "dozens" of well-known paintings and borrow their style for any image.

The feature can be used by opening up the tool – which exists as a separate tool for iOS and Android – and then selecting the Camera menu at the bottom. On there should be the option for Art Transfer, which will open up the feature.

Users can pick one of the different masterpieces and then have it transformed into the style of any of those artworks. Google will get to doing that, and give you a "fun fact" about the piece while you wait for the feature to be applied.

The feature does not simply use an overlay or a blend tool. Instead, Google has created algorithms that will recreate the photo in the style that has been chosen, it said, using artificial intelligence tools developed by the company.

Google said it has worked with cultural institutions such as the UK's National Gallery and Japan's MOA Museum of Art to allow them to have a variety of different styles, including van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch or Leonardo da Vinci.

The Google Arts & Culture app already became somewhat viral in 2018, when it gave people the chance to match their pictures with a famous artwork, allowing them to find their lookalikes in classic paintings. That doppelganger feature became available in the UK later that year.

That app caused some stir when users found that it appeared to be sending pictures to Google to do the analysis. For the Art Transfer feature, all of the processing is able to be done on device, rather without processing the image online, Google said.

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