How do you look your best in a selfie on National Selfie Day? Luckily for anyone wondering, a robot has figured it out.
An artificial intelligence (AI) system built by a Stanford University researcher Andrej Karpathy looked at 2 million selfies and learned what makes a great selfie.
In other words, it discovered what elements make up a selfie that gets more likes, favorites, and hearts.
Here's a few tips the program came up with for women wanting to take a better selfie, according to Karpathy's blog post about the project:
1. Be female. Sorry, guys.
2. Show your long hair. Wear a wig if you don't have any?
3. Take it alone.
4. Use a light background or a filter. Selfies that were very washed out, filtered black and white, or had a border got more likes. According to Karpathy, "over-saturated lighting ... often makes the face look much more uniform and faded out."
5. Crop the image. Make it so your forehead gets cut off and your face is prominently in the middle third of the photo. Some of the "best" selfies are also slightly tilted.
Below are the cream of the crop — the top 100 of 50,000 images that the AI analyzed after being trained on more than 2 million selfies.
Notice that of the best 100 selfies, not a single man is included, and there are very few people of color.
And here are the male images that did the best, you can see similar trends cropping up, especially the number of images with white borders, though the male images more frequently included the whole head and shoulders, Karpathy writes:
On the other hand, the worst images, or the selfies that probably wouldn't get as many likes, were group shots, badly lit, and often too close up.
So if you want your selfie to get a lot of love, make sure you follow the rules above.
Guia Marie Del Prado wrote a previous version of this post.
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