AI-generated art has been making waves recently and one artist has used the technology to bring back celebrities from the dead.
Photographer and lawyer Alper Yesiltas has used AI technology to imagine what celebrities would look like if they were still alive.
His first collection includes portraits of Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Tupac, and Freddie Mercury.
The Istanbul-based artist recently shared the first collection of the project, titled ‘As If Nothing Happened’ featuring AI-generated images of an older Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Princess Diana and Bruce Lee.
‘With the development of AI technology, I’ve been excited for a while, thinking that “anything imaginable can be shown in reality”,’ Yesiltas wrote about the project.
‘When I started tinkering with technology, I saw what I could do and thought about what would make me the happiest. I wanted to see some of the people I missed again in front of me and that’s how this project emerged,’
‘The hardest part of the creative process for me is making the image feel “real” to me. The moment I like the most is when I think the image in front of me looks very realistic as if it was taken by a photographer.’
To create the images, Yesiltas used software like the AI photo enhancer Remini and photo editing programs like Adobe Lightroom and VSCO.
AI has been used before to reimagine the genius of dead celebrities. In 2021, Google’s AI program Magenta was used to create songs in the style of musicians who died at 27 like Cobain and Hendrix.
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