Book of Smiles

No photographer ever pressed the shutter button to capture the images in this book. The subjects never posed for these images. They all arise from the imagination of an advanced artificial intelligence, trained on millions of images.

The technology of artificial intelligence - also known as AI - clearly has the potential to change all of our lives. If for the better or the worse still has to be decided. Some professions will be impacted sooner - some later. Many people fear for their jobs, some are eager to see, how AI can help, making their jobs easier. But one thing is obvious: It will affect us all.

Photographers, for example, will be severely affected in the near future. With technology evolving at a rapid pace, some fields of photography might be obsolete in a couple of years. Take stock photography: In the foreseeable future, stock-photo-sites could have an integrated AI and instead of searching for an existing photo, you will tell the AI, which image you want it to create. AI already can produce pictures of photorealistic landscapes, almost undistinguishable from reality. It can create fantastical architecture and even almost perfect human faces. So what about portrait and fashion photography? This book contains portraits of famous people from all areas - actors, musicians, artists, politicians, religious leaders, tech moguls, athletes and fashion icons - as if they were taken by Herb Ritts or Peter Lindbergh.

All these images are a result of what a machine learning model "thinks" a portrait by Herb Ritts would look like. So does this mean, portrait photography will be obsolete too? I don't know. I only know, there was no human photographer involved in making this book. And besides being made by an AI, all these portraits have one thing in common: a big smile on their face.