Fascinating findings about selfies

Researcher Andrej Karpathy, a PhD student at Stanford working in the Computer Vision Lab, trained a neural network computer to determine what constitutes a “good” selfie.

The finding using 50,000 pictures reveals the following:

1. We like women. The top 100 selfies the neural network chose were all women, most of which had long hair. The program also tended to prefer selfies that cropped out foreheads, for some reason.

   

   
   
2. Selfies should be mostly face. All of the best selfies seem to show the person’s face taking up about one third of the photo, with the head tilted slightly.
3. Distort the photo. Karpathy noticed that the vast majority of popular selfies had oversaturated the face in the photo, added some sort of filter, and probably added a border of some sort around the image.

Karpathy’s program also found some traits to avoid: Don’t take a photo in low light, get too close to the camera, or take a group shot. Selfies, it seems, should indeed focus on the self