This article originally appeared on VICE US. An AI-powered portrait generator went viral last week thanks to its ability to turn selfies into realistic Impressionist portraits. For people of color, however, the results leave much to be desired. The flaw in AI Portrait Ars, an app built by researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, was first pointed out by Morgan Sung, a reporter at Mashable. She found that the app "whitened my skin to an unearthly pale tone, turned my flat nose into one with a prominent bridge and pointed end, and replaced my very hooded eyes with heavily lidded ones."

In the early 1500s Lorenzo Lotto and Giovan Battista Moroni began the psychological analysis through portraiture. From this moment, the focus on the sitter's identity becomes the leitmotif in the history of portrait. Portraits interpret the external beauty, social status, and then go beyond our body and face. A portrait becomes a psychological analysis and a deep reflection on our existence. AI Portraits Ars uses Artificial Intelligence to reproduce artistic human portraits, with different styles and levels of abstraction.