Our AI Avatar Creation Adventure

The Talent Hacks team has been experimenting with AI Avatars or AI-generated photos, which has saved us a lot of time from traditional photoshoots and unleashed our creativity. I’d like to take you on a journey through how we started this process, the initial hiccups we encountered, and how we gradually improved. The best is yet to come!

It all started with Mathias and Replicate.com. Initially, Mathias started playing around with the tool, trying to train his own model, running through various iterations, attempting to find the best approach.

Based on some of the images he was sharing, I personally think he used this tool as a fitness solution to avoid traditional workouts or gym visits. Replicate provided him with a fast-track approach to not only losing weight but also building significant muscle mass. Until today, he denies the accusation.

Training the Trainers

The next step was for Mathias to share this knowledge with us. He started teaching us how to train our own Replicate models, allowing us to generate our own images in our own unique way.

And so, the adventure began. We were really excited, but that excitement was short-lived when things didn’t go as planned. While the characters we created resembled us a bit, they looked more like distant relatives rather than true reflections of us. Here’s a couple of examples:

AI Avatars: Clones or Doppelgangers?

Clearly, we were disappointed. There was a lot of hype about AI Avatars and it really wasn’t playing out to our expectations. Despite the initial disappointment, we persevered. We kept training our models, ironing out imperfections and bugs. The resemblance gradually improved, but there was still something about these images that didn’t quite come through as believable. Something unrealistic that we couldn’t exactly put our finger on. Can you?

Creeped out but stubborn, we continued onward, experimenting with more variations, ideas, and scenarios to see how our characters would evolve. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for us to encounter the next challenge:

When setting up scenarios involving multiple characters, we found ourselves appearing within the scene more than once, whether we were just background filler or very much engaged in the scene… literally.

Friends are a reflection of one's self

Appearing in your own background once is one thing, but being every person in an entire group photo is a completely different vibe. Apart from having to witness Deano’s extreme example of nepotism within recruitment, we also struggled to come up with a memorable enough name for Taz’s one man boy band. Perhaps Boyz2Man? Or 1-Origin? We’re open to ideas.

It was becoming abundantly clear that we were not yet ready for group photos. So instead, we decided to avoid the collective approach, as it wasn’t really working out, and navigated our way towards individuality and adventure. We delved into a more exciting direction, but something about the results was still not shouting “Real!”

We tried to stay positive. It began to look like the characters were actually beginning to resemble the team. On a number of occasions, we believed that the characters in the scenes were actually us, and that’s when the real fun began. Individual inspiration was free to roam. Personal initiatives flooded our team chat channel with a plethora of characters.

Of course, when that became the case, we almost immediately started picturing ourselves as our favorite movie characters. It didn’t take long before it became obvious what everyone’s favorite movie was. Can you guess all six?

The fun was just beginning for us as we unleashed our creativity in various directions, only limited by our imagination and technological capability. What can be promised is that this will continue to improve as we explore new ways to use this model.

Now it’s your opportunity to contribute to the direction we should take. Any ideas of characters we should try out? Fill out the quick questionnaire below to let us know who you would like to see and and in what setting. You don’t get many of these chances, so use it while you can!

Merry Christmas!

Thanks for reading about our AI Avatar journey. We hope you found it enjoyable and may even consider making your own Avatars. We’d love to hear your suggestions for new Talent Hacks characters. It will give us an opportunity to bond…. James Bond. Get in touch!