Google Arts And Culture App Matches Your Selfies With Famous Art
They say that we all have a doppelganger out there; someone who looks almost just like we do. Google recently updated its Arts & Culture app and it suddenly went viral. The update lets users of the app snap a selfie and then it uses AI to search famous artworks for your artsy doppelganger. For some people, the app did a very good job matching them up.
If you have never used the Arts & Culture app, it has been around since last year and was originally meant to let users browse famous art from hundreds of museums around the world. The portrait feature launched in an update last month and then went viral in a big way over the weekend. According to app metrics site App Annie, Google Arts & Vulture was the top free app over the weekend. As of writing today, the app is still tops on the free app side of things.
Special thanks to the google arts & culture app’s doppelgänger feature for keeping me humble. pic.twitter.com/dhTese3mE5
— Susie Meister (@susie_meister) January 14, 2018
The app is available for both Android and iOS users and to find your art match, you have to use the "Is your portrait in a museum?" feature and submit a photo. The AI then works its way through the thousands of paintings in the database to find the closest match possible. It even gives the searcher a percentage that the AI thinks the two photos match.
Art gals on google arts & culture... pic.twitter.com/bYBl5R6Qzg
— Molly (@mollycgallagher) January 15, 2018
Some of the matches seen were very good, while others made no sense at all. One blonde woman was matched with an image of an angry man. Some blame poor matches for races other than whites on the lack of museum representation. The app only stores the selfies you take long enough to make a match for you and promises the photos won’t be used for anything else. If you can't find this feature, Google says that it is experimental and only available in parts of the US. Google does plan to improve the app and expand availability.
