OutSnapped Launches ‘First of its Kind’ AI-Powered Photo Booth
Young people seemingly love avatars and headshots generated by artificial intelligence (AI). It is no surprise that companies are jumping into the AI fray, including New York City-based photo booth agency OutSnapped. The company has announced the launch of its patent-pending AI photo booth technology, the first of its kind.
“Over the last 20 years as a highly sought-after event photographer and blogger, I have witnessed and helped shape how brands, media, and the public create and interact with images online. The new OutSnapped AI photo booth represents a tectonic shift that will forever change the way memories are recorded. We’re so excited to work with companies to reimagine the future of experiential marketing,” says Nicholas Rhodes, founder and CEO of OutSnapped.
Founded by Rhodes in 2017, OutSnapped has worked with some huge brands, including Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Calvin Klein, and TED. The company has previously offered companies typical and virtual photo booths for their events. However, the new SnapShift.ai AI Photo Booth aims to provide users with more engaging, customized visuals that can be tuned to specific brands and events.
As seen on Kiosk Marketplace, the booth captures a photo of a person and uses AI to render images of that person in any setting and can create a custom avatar that can participate in a wide range of activities.
“Imagine your attendees stepping into our photo booth. In an instant, AI springs into action, understanding their unique attributes and applying custom filters, backgrounds, and animations that fit your brand or event. What emerges isn’t just a photo; it’s a captivating, themed visual that echoes the spirit of your event,” OutSnapped explains.
However, it is easy to come up with ways that AI may drop the ball and deliver biased outputs.
PetaPixel recently reported that an Asian student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked AI to generate a professional headshot for her, although the AI turned her white. Despite feeding a perfectly reasonable photo of herself into the Playground AI app, Rona Wang, 24, was initially amused to see the app churn out a photo of her as a white woman.
“However, I’m glad to see that this has catalyzed a larger conversation around AI bias and who is or isn’t included in this new wave of technology,” Wang tells Insider.
OutSnapped and its corporate clients want to avoid outcomes like this.
Partnering with financial company SoFi, OutSnapped aims to “redefine the ‘face of finance.'” When SoFi asked AI to generate images of people who are good with money, good at earning money, or good at investing. Of the thousands of generated images, less than 2% of the results showed women.
The results reflect bias within AI and not reality. Of course, the issue is not that the AI models are biased but that they are trained using content reflecting institutional and societal biases.
To overcome these biases, SoFi is retraining AI using images of women in finance, featuring equal gender representation in its imagery and with content creators, and offering resources designed to help women with their finance.
For its part, OutSnapped showed SoFi how its pop-up AI photo booth does not demonstrate the concerning biases against women in finance. SoFi has subsequently used the generated images as part of its efforts to retrain AI.
Image credits: OutSnapped
