I’m curious what the training set was for the model. I’m guessing perhaps a set of Japanese imageboard threads where artists draw manga interpretations of portraits. (These portraits tend to be of photogenic women, generally of east-Asian ethnicity, so it makes sense to see that most of the better examples in the thread seem to fall within that area.)

It can work for men OK too.

Bumped into this about a week ago and after quite a few tries it looked pretty good.

Figured to toss a few dollars to the person who created this via the paypal link at their site. But then paypal told me: "Currently PayPal accounts in China are only able to send payments. This recipient is not eligible to receive funds."

Meh..

Emailed the author to inform them and they mused about using bitcoin, but that the threshold is too high for casual users.

Perhaps time to reconsider.

I tried it with a few photos. Best results with images with low-contrast lighting on the face.

Sigh, one more reason why we really need a strong paypal competitor.

The problem there is not PayPal. It is the company formerly named GoPay, a Chinese company, that necessarily adheres to Chinese law.

Send them cryptocurrency.

Otherwise known as cryptocurrency?

I think the bad results occurred when there were too many variations in shadow and color on the faces.

People with clean lines and smooth gradients on their faces came out better.

It reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder"... maybe medical staff were just computers with some wonky ML for standards.

It definitely prettifies most people although for one guy it took out his mouth. For the most part it “airbrushed them” and prettified the subjects.

Yeah, I have a goatee, and ... my waifu ended up with no mouth or any other lower-face features.