An app that lets skiers generate AI versions of themselves ripping up the slopes has gone viral.
The AI Skier Generator, created by resort website GOSNOMAD.COM, helps skiers and snowboarders produce fun and quirky avatars of themselves ruling supreme on the snow, from sliding snow park rails and carving round racing gates to dancing on tables at après-ski.
After uploading a selfie and selecting the type of avatar they want to create, the user waits just 10 seconds while the free-to-use AI Skier Generator produces a fun image that is instantly downloadable and ready to share across any platform.
The service has been used by more than 75,000 skiers since its launch in early March, including a number of pro skiers and influencers. Big names such as Estonian Olympic freestyle skier Kelly Sildaru, Swiss Olympic freestyle skier Sarah Höfflin, three-times X-Games gold medallist and slopestyle world champion Andri Ragettli, also from Switzerland, have all used the AI Skier Generator to share their avatars across their social media. Influencers steepsteep, KJ Read and Hanah Melinn also got in on the act, among others, helping the app to attract thousands of new users just days from launch — crashing Snomad.ski servers in the process. (They’re up and running again now!)
“The final images are impressively realistic and accurately resemble the user’s uploaded photo by using proprietary software that incorporates generative AI, advanced machine learning algorithms and deep neural networks to accurately map users’ faces onto the generated avatars,” said Dan Lever, founder of SNOMAD, adding, “What started as a fun project for our users quickly and unexpectedly snowballed into thousands upon thousands of new website visitors, after pro skiers jumped in on the action and started sharing their images on social platforms. Very quickly, we had to scale up our servers to cope with the extra traffic to the website.
“AI Skier is all about having and sharing the fun with friends off the slopes to provide inspiration and to get people hyped up about getting to the mountains — we’ve combined our passions for technology and skiing for this fun project, to keep the ski stoke going off-snow and to help raise awareness of SNOMAD.”
SNOMAD launched earlier this season and has quickly built an engaged community of skiers and snowboarders supporting each other to find the perfect resorts, based on the factors that are important to them.
