A new artificial intelligence (AI) can predict which selfies are likely to get the most love, and now you can test it yourself.
Stanford PhD student Andrej Karpathy built a deep learning system that analyzed 2 million selfies and figured out the traits that make up good selfies.
Karpathy also made @deepselfie, a Twitter bot that can look at people's submitted selfies and judges them automatically. Give it a try by tweeting a square image or link to an image.
I tried it myself with my last Instagram selfie.
—Guia Marie Del Prado (@gmdelprado) November 5, 2015
It replied with my results in just a few seconds — 52.1%, just slightly better than average.
—Selfie Bot (@deepselfie) November 5, 2015
The AI behind @deepselfie established a few arbitrary rules about what makes a good selfie, after examining two million images. My selfie inadvertently follows a few of those rules — it's pretty washed out, filtered, cuts off my forehead, shows long hair, and I'm more or less in the middle. It also helps that I'm a woman, though I'm not sure if the napping kitten made much of a difference.
Here you can see which 100 selfies the AI determined were the best out of 50,000 selfies. What they have in common is pretty obvious — almost all of them include long-haired women on their own. They're also filtered, washed out, have borders, cut off foreheads, and feature faces in the middle third of the frame. There are no men, and very few people of color.
On the other hand, the worst images, or the selfies least likely to get any love, were group shots, badly lit and often too close up.
