Ever wonder how to snap a selfie that will break the internet? Luckily for you a computer program has already figured out the secrets to getting likes, favorites, and hearts.
An artificial intelligence (AI) system built by Stanford University researcher Andrej Karpathy looked at 2 million selfies to train itself to recognize the ones most likely to get a lot of love.
Below is the cream of the crop — the top 100 images in a set of 50,000 photos that the algorithm hadn't seen before.
You'll see that not even one man is included in the best 100 shots, and there are very few people of color:
Here's a few (blunt and possibly offensive) rules the program came up with on its own for taking effective selfies, according to Karpathy's blog post about the project:
1) Be female.
2) Show your long hair.
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 sure 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.
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. But the rules do change slightly — 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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