AI might help you give face scrapers the deformed finger

Born as weird abstraction, AI imagery is finding its way to consumer usefulness.

Two algorithms demonstrate that while AI is threat to humanity’s common definition of reality, it might be a helpful flunky for us in the meantime.

One commercial deepfake, written up by technology culture publication Vice, is making social media profile pictures more appealing.

A second algorithm will altern social media feed pictures to make them unrecognizable when a face scraper turns up hungry for nonconsensual harvesting.

The first example, PhotoAI, is problematic. It exists to change users into more marketable commodities, but that is what the black-and-white glossy headshot did in 1839.

A couple of examples in the Vice article would seem to depict a Forbes magazine headshot template, a captain of industry pausing, arms folded, next to windows.

The same subject is posed next to the first image with knuckle tattoos and wearing a black leather, collared shirt and a cloth tie. It is more clearly an illustration with a cloudy lake as a backdrop. The subject could be young DJ in the pages of Rolling Stone.

Spotting the fakeness is easy enough. The executive has a blister for a nose. There’s a finger bud floating on the musician’s shirt. Actually, they both have nightmarish fingers.

But that is what you get with very expensive AI imagery of people. PhotoAI charges $19 to chew on a dozen or so of your real photos to create another you. With extra fingers.

It renders in many pop-culture contexts, including comic book, and in fine deepfake style, place the customer in movies and in proximity to the rich and famous. Few are believable, but that will change with more programming. Basic would-be selfies look good though.

The more purely practical idea was found by NewScientist.

Intel Labs has written My Face My Choice, which creates an AI-altered version of a person’s stored facial image. A similarity dial, as it were, can make an image more or less representative of the person.

It is not a finished product yet, and the sharp-eyed will note that a person’s image has to be analyzed and stored for My Face to work. Are Intel employees any more trustworthy than those at any other company?

Article Topics

AI  |  biometrics  |  deepfakes  |  fraud prevention  |  social media  |  synthetic data