Making faces: How to train an AI on your face to create silly portraits
Enlarge / Ever want to be a superhero? We'll show you how. (credit: Shaun Hutchinson | Aurich Lawson | Stable Diffusion)
By now, you've read a lot about generative AI technologies such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which translate text input into images in seconds. If you're anything like me, you immediately wondered how you could use that technology to slap your face onto the Mona Lisa or Captain America. After all, who doesn't want to be America's ass?
I have a long history of putting my face on things. Previously, doing so was a painstaking process of finding or taking a picture with the right angle and expression and then using Photoshop to graft my face onto the original. While I considered the results demented yet worthwhile, the process required a lot of time. But with Stable Diffusion and Dreambooth, I'm now able to train a model on my face and then paste it onto anything my strange heart desires.
In this walkthrough, I'll show you how to install Stable Diffusion locally on your computer, train Dreambooth on your face, and generate so many pictures of yourself that your friends and family will eventually block you to stop the deluge of silly photos. The entire process will take about two hours from start to finish, with the bulk of the time spent babysitting a Google Colab notebook while it trains on your images.