AI Face Year

AI Face Year — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

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  Artisse AI

  Artisse AI is a Hong Kong-based technology company founded by William Wu. The company developed a mobile photography application using generative artificial intelligence to transform selfies into high-quality, personalized images. The app allows users to visualize themselves in various scenarios, outfits, and hairstyles, and they can adjust lighting and ambiance to match their preferences. The app launched in 2023 across multiple markets, including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Australia. By January 2024, users had generated over 5 million images. That same month, the company secured $6.7 million in seed funding to support product development and marketing. == History == Artisse was originally founded in South Korea in 2022 by William Wu. The early concept was connected to a virtual idol initiative developed in collaboration with a K-pop agency, intended to support Wu's blockchain gaming business. The project later evolved into a standalone AI photography application. The current version of the Artisse app was developed following the company's relocation to Hong Kong in 2022. In January 2024, Artisse secured $6.7 million in seed funding, led by The London Fund. The investment was aimed at supporting product development, marketing, and user acquisition. Artisse uses an AI algorithm to create hyperrealistic images from uploaded photos. The app generates personalized images by combining generative AI technology, a global pool of licensed talent, and finished art services. The app works with individual users and businesses, offering professional-grade photos and advertisement images. According to the British newspaper Evening Standard the company has developed the world's first and most advanced AI photographer. It captures 15-30 photos of the user and generates 2D images, placing them in various outfits and locations worldwide. === Catheron Gaming === Artisse AI originated from Catheon Gaming, a blockchain gaming and entertainment company founded in 2021 by William Wu. Catheon Gaming published more than 30 Web3 titles in its first year, developed a blockchain game distribution platform, and offered advisory services to external developers. In 2022, HSBC and KPMG listed Catheon Gaming among the "Top 10 Emerging Giants" in the Asia–Pacific region, selected from a pool of more than 6,000 startups. In June 2023, Catheon Gaming was rebranded as Artisse Interactive, creating two divisions: Artisse Gaming, which continued blockchain and Web3 game development, and Artisse AI, which focused on generative photography technology. == Technology == Artisse uses a proprietary generative AI model combined with open-source imaging frameworks and diffusion models. Users are prompted to upload between 15 and 30 personal images, allowing the AI to train a personalized model in 30 to 40 minutes. After training, the app generates new images based on either textual or visual prompts, with options to adjust elements such as clothing, hairstyles, lighting, and backgrounds. To enhance realism, the app integrates augmented reality features and image refinement tools. The company has introduced features to address representation issues related to body shape and skin tone, although concerns persist about the ethical implications of altering personal traits. == Products == === Artisse mobile app === Available on iOS and Android platforms in 35 languages. Users initially receive 25 free images, after which the app adopts a subscription pricing model ranging from approximately $6 to $30 per month. By early 2024, the app reported around 4,000 paying subscribers out of more than 200,000 downloads. === Business and enterprise services === Artisse provides B2B solutions for creating marketing imagery and partners with agencies like Iconic Management to enable cost-effective virtual photoshoots. Additional features in development include virtual try-on capabilities and augmented reality integration for fashion retail. == Reception == Media coverage has noted the app's photorealistic image outputs with some sources highlighting its ease of use. However, concerns have been raised regarding image authenticity, algorithmic biases, and the potential impact on professional photography and modeling. Artisse has been widely covered by media outlets including TechCrunch, PetaPixel, Forbes Australia, and The Evening Standard. These publications discussed the app's integration of generative AI technology within the consumer photography space, its growing market influence, and its rapid adoption by users worldwide.

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  Personoid

  Personoid is the concept coined by Stanisław Lem, a Polish science-fiction writer, in Non Serviam, from his book A Perfect Vacuum (1971). His personoids are an abstraction of functions of human mind and they live in computers; they do not need any human-like physical body. In cognitive and software modeling, personoid is a research approach to the development of intelligent autonomous agents. In frame of the IPK (Information, Preferences, Knowledge) architecture, it is a framework of abstract intelligent agent with a cognitive and structural intelligence. It can be seen as an essence of high intelligent entities. From the philosophical and systemics perspectives, personoid societies can also be seen as the carriers of a culture. According to N. Gessler, the personoids study can be a base for the research on artificial culture and culture evolution. == Personoids on TV and cinema == Welt am Draht (1973) The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

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  AI washing

  AI washing is a deceptive marketing tactic that consists of promoting a product or a service by overstating the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and the integration of it. Companies often involve in the practice to mislead customers to boost their offerings, and to secure funding from investors. The practice raises concerns regarding transparency, and legal issues. == Definition == AI washing is a deceptive marketing practice. It involves promoting a product or a service by overstating the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and its integration in the design and manufacture of the same. The practice raises concerns regarding transparency, compliance with security regulations, and consumer trust in the AI industry potentially hampering legitimate advancements in AI. The term was first defined by the AI Now Institute, a research institute based at New York University in 2019. The term is derived from greenwashing, another deceptive marketing technique that misrepresents a product's environmental impact in a similar manner. AI washing might involve a company claiming to have used AI in the development or enhancement of its products or services without its actual involvement, or using buzzwords such as "smart" or "AI-powered" without the product actually offering it or making use of it. A company may overstate the usage of AI or misuse the term, which is also construed as AI washing. In 2026, The Washington Post defined AI washing as "a trend for bosses to blame layoffs on the productive capabilities of AI and its ability to replace workers, even when job cuts may have little to do with the technology". == Usage and effects == AI washing can lead to deception of customers and misleading of investors. It is also an illegal and unethical practice that lacks transparency regarding disclosing the details of a product or a service. Companies get involved in such a practice often in response to competition who might have used AI in their offerings. It might also be used as a ploy to secure funding and investment, assuming that it will attract them towards it. AI washing has been compared to dot-com bubble, when businesses appended "dot-com" to the end of the business name to boost their valuation. In September 2023, Coca-Cola released a new product called Coca-Cola Y3000, and the company stated that the Y3000 flavor had been "co-created with human and artificial intelligence". The company was accused of AI washing due to no proof of AI involvement in the creation of the product, and critics believed that AI was used as a way to grab consumer attention more than it was used in the actual product creation. In 2026, mass tech layoffs were attributed to AI washing from AI innovation instead of balance sheet restructuring. == Mitigation == Companies are expected to be transparent and clearer in communicating the usage of AI in their products or services. Consumers can mitigate the same by requesting for hard evidence from the companies regarding the usage of AI tools. Customers should evaluate the product or service as a whole rather than being swayed by the usage of AI. Informed decision making and purchasing can keep them from falling for such marketing gimmicks. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) imposes penalties for companies indulging in such practices. In March 2024, the SEC imposed the first civil penalties on two companies for misleading statements about their use of AI, and in July 2024, it charged a corporate executive from a supposed AI hiring startup with fraud for the usage of buzzwords related to AI.

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  Self-supervised learning

  Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a paradigm in machine learning where a model is trained on a task using the data itself to generate supervisory signals, rather than relying on externally-provided labels. In the context of neural networks, self-supervised learning aims to leverage inherent structures or relationships within the input data to create meaningful training signals. SSL tasks are designed so that solving them requires capturing essential features or relationships in the data. The input data is typically augmented or transformed in a way that creates pairs of related samples, where one sample serves as the input, and the other is used to formulate the supervisory signal. This augmentation can involve introducing noise, cropping, rotation, or other transformations. Self-supervised learning more closely imitates the way humans learn to classify objects. During SSL, the model learns in two steps. First, the task is solved based on an auxiliary or pretext classification task using pseudo-labels, which help to initialize the model parameters. Next, the actual task is performed with supervised or unsupervised learning. Self-supervised learning has produced promising results in recent years, and has found practical application in fields such as audio processing, and is being used by Facebook and others for speech recognition. == Pseudo-labels == Pseudo-labels are automatically generated labels that a model assigns to unlabeled data based on its own predictions. They are widely used in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning, where ground-truth annotations are limited or unavailable. By treating predicted labels as surrogate ground truth, learning algorithms can make use of large quantities of unlabeled data in the training process. Pseudo-labeling also plays an important role in systems that must adapt to concept drift, where the statistical properties of the data change over time. In these scenarios, the model may detect that an incoming instance deviates from previously learned behavior. The system then generates a classification result for that instance, and this predicted class is used as a pseudo-label for updating or retraining model components that are becoming outdated. This approach enables continuous adaptation in dynamic environments without requiring manual annotation. In many adaptive learning pipelines, pseudo-labels are chosen when the classifier produces sufficiently confident predictions, reducing the risk of propagating errors. These pseudo-labeled instances are then incorporated into training to refresh or evolve the model's understanding of emerging data patterns, particularly when existing components show signs of “aging” due to drift or distributional shifts. This strategy reduces reliance on manual labeling while helping maintain long-term model performance. == Types == === Autoassociative self-supervised learning === Autoassociative self-supervised learning is a specific category of self-supervised learning where a neural network is trained to reproduce or reconstruct its own input data. In other words, the model is tasked with learning a representation of the data that captures its essential features or structure, allowing it to regenerate the original input. The term "autoassociative" comes from the fact that the model is essentially associating the input data with itself. This is often achieved using autoencoders, which are a type of neural network architecture used for representation learning. Autoencoders consist of an encoder network that maps the input data to a lower-dimensional representation (latent space), and a decoder network that reconstructs the input from this representation. The training process involves presenting the model with input data and requiring it to reconstruct the same data as closely as possible. The loss function used during training typically penalizes the difference between the original input and the reconstructed output (e.g. mean squared error). By minimizing this reconstruction error, the autoencoder learns a meaningful representation of the data in its latent space. === Contrastive self-supervised learning === For a binary classification task, training data can be divided into positive examples and negative examples. Positive examples are those that match the target. For example, if training a classifier to identify birds, the positive training data would include images that contain birds. Negative examples would be images that do not. Contrastive self-supervised learning uses both positive and negative examples. The loss function in contrastive learning is used to minimize the distance between positive sample pairs, while maximizing the distance between negative sample pairs. An early example uses a pair of 1-dimensional convolutional neural networks to process a pair of images and maximize their agreement. Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) allows joint pretraining of a text encoder and an image encoder, such that a matching image-text pair have image encoding vector and text encoding vector that span a small angle (having a large cosine similarity). InfoNCE (Noise-Contrastive Estimation) is a method to optimize two models jointly, based on Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE). Given a set X = { x 1 , … x N } {\displaystyle X=\left\{x_{1},\ldots x_{N}\right\}} of N {\displaystyle N} random samples containing one positive sample from p ( x t + k ∣ c t ) {\displaystyle p\left(x_{t+k}\mid c_{t}\right)} and N − 1 {\displaystyle N-1} negative samples from the 'proposal' distribution p ( x t + k ) {\displaystyle p\left(x_{t+k}\right)} , it minimizes the following loss function: L N = − E X [ log ⁡ f k ( x t + k , c t ) ∑ x j ∈ X f k ( x j , c t ) ] {\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}_{\mathrm {N} }=-\mathbb {E} _{X}\left[\log {\frac {f_{k}\left(x_{t+k},c_{t}\right)}{\sum _{x_{j}\in X}f_{k}\left(x_{j},c_{t}\right)}}\right]} === Non-contrastive self-supervised learning === Non-contrastive self-supervised learning (NCSSL) uses only positive examples. Counterintuitively, NCSSL converges on a useful local minimum rather than reaching a trivial solution, with zero loss. For the example of binary classification, it would trivially learn to classify each example as positive. Effective NCSSL requires an extra predictor on the online side that does not back-propagate on the target side. === Joint-Embedding and Predictive Architectures === A major class of self-supervised learning moves beyond contrastive pairs, instead maximizing the agreement between views while preventing collapse through statistical constraints. Rooted in Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (Deep CCA), this approach includes Joint-Embedding Architectures (JEA) like Barlow Twins and VICReg, which enforce covariance constraints to learn invariant representations without negative sampling. Deep Latent Variable Path Modelling (DLVPM) generalizes this to multimodal systems, using path models to enforce correlation and orthogonality across diverse data types. In 2022 Yann LeCun introduced Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) as a step towards decision making, reasoning, and autonomous human intelligence in machines, including self-improvement through autonomous learning. Founded in representation learning, LeCun included the concept of a “world model” in JEPA which aims to enable machines to replicate human intellect by providing machines with a concept for the world in which they exist. Unlike autoencoders, JEPAs operate entirely in latent space, avoiding pixel-level noise to focus on semantic structure. Rather than just learning invariance, JEPAs learn by predicting masked latent representations from visible context. JEPA has been applied to domains such as image analysis, audio processing, and motion in images and video. == Comparison with other forms of machine learning == SSL belongs to supervised learning methods insofar as the goal is to generate a classified output from the input. At the same time, however, it does not require the explicit use of labeled input-output pairs. Instead, correlations, metadata embedded in the data, or domain knowledge present in the input are implicitly and autonomously extracted from the data. These supervisory signals, extracted from the data, can then be used for training. SSL is similar to unsupervised learning in that it does not require labels in the sample data. Unlike unsupervised learning, however, learning is not done using inherent data structures. Semi-supervised learning combines supervised and unsupervised learning, requiring only a small portion of the learning data be labeled. In transfer learning, a model designed for one task is reused on a different task. Training an autoencoder intrinsically constitutes a self-supervised process, because the output pattern needs to become an optimal reconstruction of the input pattern itself. However, in current jargon, the term 'self-supervised' often refers to tasks based on a pretext-task training setup

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  Content Security Policy

  Content Security Policy (CSP) is a computer security standard introduced to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context. It is a Candidate Recommendation of the W3C working group on Web Application Security, widely supported by modern web browsers. CSP provides a standard method for website owners to declare approved origins of content that browsers should be allowed to load on that website—covered types are JavaScript, CSS, HTML frames, web workers, fonts, images, embeddable objects such as Java applets, ActiveX, audio and video files, and other HTML5 features. == Status == The standard, originally named Content Restrictions, was proposed by Robert Hansen in 2004, first implemented in Firefox 4 and quickly picked up by other browsers. Version 1 of the standard was published in 2012 as W3C candidate recommendation and quickly with further versions (Level 2) published in 2014. As of 2023, the draft of Level 3 is being developed with the new features being quickly adopted by the web browsers. The following header names are in use as part of experimental CSP implementations: Content-Security-Policy – standard header name proposed by the W3C document. Google Chrome supports this as of version 25. Firefox supports this as of version 23, released on 6 August 2013. WebKit supports this as of version 528 (nightly build). Chromium-based Microsoft Edge support is similar to Chrome's. X-WebKit-CSP – deprecated, experimental header introduced into Google Chrome, Safari and other WebKit-based web browsers in 2011. X-Content-Security-Policy – deprecated, experimental header introduced in Gecko 2 based browsers (Firefox 4 to Firefox 22, Thunderbird 3.3, SeaMonkey 2.1). A website can declare multiple CSP headers, also mixing enforcement and report-only ones. Each header will be processed separately by the browser. CSP can also be delivered within the HTML code using a meta tag, although in this case its effectiveness will be limited. Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11 also support CSP, but only sandbox directive, using the experimental X-Content-Security-Policy header. A number of web application frameworks support CSP, for example AngularJS (natively) and Django (middleware). Instructions for Ruby on Rails have been posted by GitHub. Web framework support is however only required if the CSP contents somehow depend on the web application's state—such as usage of the nonce origin. Otherwise, the CSP is rather static and can be delivered from web application tiers above the application, for example on load balancer or web server. === Bypasses === In December 2015 and December 2016, a few methods of bypassing 'nonce' allowlisting origins were published. In January 2016, another method was published, which leverages server-wide CSP allowlisting to exploit old and vulnerable versions of JavaScript libraries hosted at the same server (frequent case with CDN servers). In May 2017 one more method was published to bypass CSP using web application frameworks code. == Mode of operation == If the Content-Security-Policy header is present in the server response, a compliant client enforces the declarative allowlist policy. One example goal of a policy is a stricter execution mode for JavaScript in order to prevent certain cross-site scripting attacks. In practice this means that a number of features are disabled by default: Inline JavaScript code