Have you ever wondered what your future child will look like? If your answer is yes, you can try the AI baby filter that went viral on TikTok.
The photo editing and enhancing app, called Remini, is currently the second most popular free app in the Apple App Store. According to data from the Appfigures app analytics platform, it has been downloaded an estimated 2 million times in the US since its launch in August 2019. Users need to upload photos of themselves or their partner to create pictures of what their future children might look like using the AI baby filter.
Many users of the app displayed their results on TikTok under the hashtag #AIbabyfilter with 6.9 million views and the hashtag #Remini with 1.4 billion views. However, not all videos under the Remini tag are the results of the AI baby filter.
Some parents feel the AI-generated baby photos bear a striking resemblance to their real children.
For example, TikTok user Audrey, who posted videos with the username @audreyanne.j, shared a comparison video that includes images of her real child, as well as the baby produced by artificial intelligence. “Wait, it looks like I see [the resemblance],” Audrey wrote in the caption of her video, which has been viewed more than 370,000 times since she uploaded it a week ago.
Speaking to Insider, Audrey said, “I tried the filter just for fun, but I was really shocked at how accurate the results were. Many of the ‘babies’ the app showed were very similar to my daughter, and some of them could have been literally her siblings. That’s kind of scary,” she said.
Who owns the Remini app?
Remini is owned by Bending Spoons, a Milan-based software company that also owns video editing app Splice and health app 30 Day Fitness. Apart from the AI baby filter, the Remini app has other photo enhancement features.
A Bending Spoons spokesperson, who said the app was downloaded nearly 40 million times worldwide in the two weeks between July 2 and July 15, stated that Remini uses multiple content moderation filters to prevent abuse or inappropriate content creation. He also added that all images are encrypted and stored with a US-based provider.
“Users always have control over their data and we do not sell, rent or trade users’ images to any third party,” the spokesperson said.
Bo An, co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or AI.R, said in an interview with Insider that AI filters typically use a deep learning model to create a synthetic image from given input images: The baby was trained to learn the relationships between images. Then, given the input images of the adults, the model can predict the appearance of their future children based on the learned correlations.”
However, Bo stressed that people should be careful when sharing photos with AI applications: “There may be those who try to use the generated images in images such as child pornography.”
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