With the explosion of chatbots like ChatGPT driving the tech boom, many people have considered the fear in mind: will AI replace human beings? Discussion in the media would have us believe that such fear is unnecessary. However, the runaway success of a Chinese AI-powered digital portrait generator (生成器) has ignited such fears again, especially among social media users.
Users of the mobile app need to pay 9.9 yuan ($1.4) and upload at least 20 recent portraits each to get a digital clone, which can be used to create different types of portraits fit for ID purposes, formal occasions or even everyday lifestyle.
According to an online survey from lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, 72% of the users preferred the photo created by the generator to those created by a renowned professional portrait photography chain in China. Facial expressions, lighting, overall appearance ... the whole range of technical aspects seemed superior. Take me for example, most importantly, I didn't need to spend more time and money in dressing up and striking unnatural poses in front of a group of unfamiliar people. I could get various photos at the price of, say, a cup of Starbucks coffee, without having to step out of my home.
So, in the next step, will photographers, image specialists and such people lose their jobs? Unlikely.
Tech without the human touch has its own shortcomings. I soon discovered that many of my friends also tried out the app, and their portraits had the same or similar poses and costumes etc.—a kind of one-size-fits-all setting. Which is to say that homogenization (均质化) makes offline photo studies a necessity still. It's too early to say that AI portrait apps will replace offline photo studios.
Some people feel AIGC (生成式人工智能) may be just a passing tech trend. A real- world assessment took place between AI doctors and human doctors in June. To everyone's surprise, human doctors scored an average of 7.5 out of 10, while AI doctors scored 7.2. AI doctors' recommendations, however, were found to be 96 percent as good as those of top-level physicians.
Ma Ting, a professor of neuroinformatics (神经信息学) said when doctors make decisions based on patients' diagnoses, they consider multidimensional data, which are difficult for AI to access and assess. "To fully allow AI to move from its general understanding to advanced intelligence, we still need more research, more data and more intelligent algorithms(算法)." Ma said.
