Persona Images

Getting images for your personas

One question we receive from almost everyone using our AI-generated buyer personas is What about the pictures of the personas, can we use them?. When we started, we turned to the apparent places for stock images, looking for pictures that would fit the described persona. As everyone else who is creating personas, we were in need of distinctive pictures of people from all genders, ethnics, and ages. Looking for that in stock photos is a tiresome business.

So we did the obvious thing and started generating and tagging pictures with the help of AI, to be more specific, we use a technology called generative adversarial network (GAN) introduced by Ian Goodfellow and further improved by Kerras et al. to generate the images used for our personas.

Generative Adversarial Networks

What are GANs, and why can they create images of people that are hardly distinguishable from pictures of real humans?
In layman's terms, GANS are two neural networks that try to win against each other. Neural network 1 (the generator) creates a picture, and neural network 2 (the discriminator) attempts to determine if it is fake or not. In this way, the network learns to mimic any distribution of data as closely as possible to real data.

In our case, the generated and real data consist of pictures of people, thus the network learning to create pictures as close to reality as possible. We can create an infinite amount of pictures, resembling every possible combination of age, gender, ethnicity, and features like glasses, hats, … While our GAN is working, we create new images, never running out of unique pictures fitting your personas. While we monitor your data and evolve your personas, i.e., if the markets or customers change, we can evolve your pictures too.

Even if academia (Hill et al.) discusses the biases introduced by different pictures in personas and whether stereotypes enter the design process, if certain pictures are used, we at Mnemonic believe that a good picture helps you develop a sense of "who you are talking to." In comparison to (non-) research-based personas, the AI-generated ones from Mnemonic choose pictures most fitting to the data describing the underlying real humans. Even with all the AI stuff going on under the hood, personas are a people game that is not 100% right without a visualization.