Ah, this one couldn't find my face. It kept focusing on my left ear and gave it a 5 for attractiveness. Then it couldn't find my face any longer. There was another fun one posted here months ago [1].
I wanna say I'm disappointed, but I'd be lying. I'm happy that A.I. cannot detect us black people. I'll need to do something about that left ear though.
The only person I know who did something about his left ear, did admirable. Just don’t wrap the ear in a newspaper and hand it to a prostitute, as I doubt that sort of thing will work out well in these modern times.
> Vincent took the ear and wrapped it in newspaper. With a hat pulled down over his wound, he, with ear in hand, left the house to go to a “maison de tolerance”, a brothel close to the house. There he asked for a girl named Rachel who he gave the ear to saying “Guard this object carefully.”
Cannot decide if I should respond with a meme reference to Samual L. Jackson asking "Does he look like a *?" or ask "Do you also cook? Do you have a deep voice? Are we only used to seeing your torso and your hands? Do you have a popular YouTube show?"
But frankly, that's interesting the accommodation you have to make for an algorithm to play with your daughter. I wonder what other accommodations people make in life because of algorithms.
I mean, it's an EU-funded academic site designed to raise awareness of privacy issues, so I'm inclined to believe them when they say they aren't keeping any of this data.
Maybe it's because programmers tend to think categorically, but I find HN frequently has this problem where people are freaking out like "why is it okay when Mozilla does X but you don't want Google to do X?!" as though we're supposed to treat every question as some sort of sui generis scenario divorced from all history and context.
History matters, context matters. I (generally) trust academics and democratically-elected governments, and I (generally) distrust giant ad-tech companies and authoritarian states.
The project was created as part of my role as artist within the Sherpa consortium. It's a Horizon2020 research project whose goal is to figure out what Europeans believe are the biggest issues around AI that we'll experience in 2025. Most of the other partners are universities, and I'm the lucky one who gets to translate what we learn into art pieces.
I followed a link to socialcooling.com as well the other day. The things you are talking about are critical for a decent civilisation moving forward. Thank you for talking about them and making us think.
That's difficult to say. You could start with getting to to know an issue and specialising in it. Reading books from academic writers (not the stuff sold at airport bookstores). Read Slashdot. Once you've got a grasp, think about how you could translate what you learnt so that your mom would understand it. Think about what your mom likes: quizes, human-interest stories. Lighthearted stuff. Then create your own translation.
It's probably easiest to connect with a local group of people who care about these issues.
One I trained myself (BMI), and the others I just scavenged from existing Github projects. So with most of these I don't know how they were trained, what photos they were fed, etc.
Then I guess it says something negative about today's internet that I trust some random guy a lot more than I trust Facebook or Google and their hordes of lawyers. If he says he's not collecting my data, I'm inclined to believe him. If Google says they won't misuse my data, I assume that comes with 200 pages of legalese loopholes to let them do whatever they want.
When they asked for webcam permission I instinctively checked to make sure my webcam was unplugged. Having an algorithm compliment your face is like having a horoscope tell you "You're loyal to fault and you're the kind of person that has tons of friends but you value your closest relationships the most..." etc.
Technically. But as a European I'd already be in a lot of trouble for breaking the law, since the website promises to not collect personal data.
What you can do is check the javascript code for any 'http'. So open https://www.hownormalami.eu/main.js and then do CTRL-F and type in 'http'. See if any of the things you find seem to call home. Also scan over the code visually to check for any obfuscated code patterns which could hide additional instances of data transmission. In this case you won't find any shenanigans.
I was more referring to the fact that it's possible to use it completely offline after the initial load, allowing you to use the app without risking any data leaving your machine.
That being said, I did talk to the author a little bit, and am inclined to trust him.
I don't click TOS's away not because I am used to them, but because I decided they are not worth my time (based on their length and abundance, how I value my time and what I gain from reading them).
In makes me a bit angry sometimes, you must often confirm you READ it, but it is undoable. They really don't expect you to either, because if they would, they'd be saying their service would really only be used by people reading their entire TOS, which would be too small a crowd to base your business on.
Of course tosdr.org is an interesting alternative and as far as cookie banners are confirmed I truly am finding myself conditioned click them away asap.
> you must often confirm you READ it, but it is undoable
If they actually wanted you to read it, they wouldn't present 50kb of text in a tiny font on a phone screen and give you an 'accept' button at the top (much less give you a 'view' and 'accept' button where the former leads to the 50kb of tiny text and the latter just glosses over the whole affair.)
I did read the TOS, but I have cookies disabled so it still said NO. I suspect that most of the people who do read the TOS probably also have cookies disabled, and therefore also were not counted.
I read the TOS too. I have first party cookies enabled, but I also said no to agreeing to include my data in the dataset. I suspect there's a selection bias of one kind of other in the TOS piece. Probably correlates with other fields too!
Thought the same myself. I am not that old, but still optimistic about the challenge of never uploading an image of myself to the net. I am on pics uploaded by others sadly.
> It's almost like there paid PR campaigns sweeping across social media.
Alternatively it's almost like Microsoft made a concerted effort to stop being the biggest scumbags in the entire industry and started doing some nice things, and people adjusted their opinions based on new evidence. Not that anyone is saying we should "love" them, but maybe we can stop referring to them as "Micro$oft" now.
Not everything has to be some giant conspiracy. Microsoft are simply being less evil than they were two decades ago. Google eschewed "Don't be evil" in favour of "Try to be less evil than Oracle, but beyond that don't worry too much". The "switch" that got flipped was the actions of those entities.
(As for Apple, I strongly disagree with your take. I've seen almost nothing but negative sentiment towards Apple for years now, even from former fanboys)
> Alternatively it's almost like Microsoft made a concerted effort to stop being the biggest scumbags in the entire industry and started doing some nice things, and people adjusted their opinions based on new evidence.
What evidence? Microsoft has been going more towards the "facebook" route with their move to turn the windows OS into a data collecting platform. And their "open source" move is filled with "telemetry".
> Not everything has to be some giant conspiracy.
Here comes those "conspiracy" talk. Everybody and their grandmother uses "conspiracy" as an argument against things they disagree with. I didn't say it was conspiracy. That corporations have PR campaigns isn't new. As a matter of fact, the founder of the site you are on wrote about it.
> (As for Apple, I strongly disagree with your take. I've seen almost nothing but negative sentiment towards Apple for years now, even from former fanboys)
You've seen nothing but negative sentiment about apple? Where? Here, they are mostly championed as the "anti-facebook". But maybe we are reading different threads.
Age and gender are derived using the FaceApiJS project. In my own experience it's doesn't vary as wildly if you're a white male. With other ethnicities the predictability levels can drop, especially if you're Asian.
What a great website and cool way to present a technical topic. Online education is still in its infancy and when we talk nowadays about good examples of online education, we usually think of videos and (in the best case) of websites where students can play with interactive models, solve exercises, etc. But this website demonstrates that you can still go mucher further in involving the listener as a person.
This of course requires an enormous effort in the preparation of the material.
I wish I'd known about the Javascript face analysis beforehand! And also how hard it would be to learn Javascript ;) And how to do that cool embedded video thing.
The immediate feedback about how I did is nice, but also may pollute the data in a way. Once I got it right, I new to retry a very similar expression for the next 1-2 tries.
But then, most people might actually know how to make human expressions naturally. Personally, I appreciated this as a tool to help me learn how to human. :-)
That was simply amazing. Having the video guide you through all the machine learning prediction steps as they got analyzed on your video feed worked flawless, both in terms of technical execution but also presentatio nwise.
They also made some great points about how ridiculous some of these algorithms are (shake your head to lose 10 years of age, or just trying to predict BMI from a face photo)
And I was surprised to know that this has made its way into hiring! So, the job hunt is going to get even more superfluous? Really reminds me of that Episode in Black Mirror, where everything depends on your rating..
Yeah the data-gathering-AI-stuff is cool & creepy but I'm actually more interested in the UX of the site.
Forget buttons, dialogs, beautifully designed pages. Future UIs should have videos of a person talking telling you what is happening and what to do next!
> Future UIs should have videos of a person talking telling you what is happening and what to do next!
Only if those who want to can turn it off and get text. It works in this context, but most contexts I'm going to guess it would be more rather than less frustrating.
I got 6.9 (7.0 without glasses) -- definitely not more attractive than any of those guys. Even my mother would say Henry Cavill is considerably more attractive than me without batting an eyelid.
I would imagine there is some sort of penalty given the face is on a 2D surface.
Since your screen is most likely flat, you'd have to hold the camera directed straight at it and at a bit of a distance in order for their face not to get distorted by perspective. Even a slight angle would make it appear to the algorithm that they have too big of a forehead/chin, or an asymmetric face (otherwise known as a 5/10).
When I saw the headline I thought maybe it was an essay about how to think about your own mental state, which would have been super interesting to me – I'm desperate to know whether the little goblins running around in my head are part of the human condition or are my own customized baggage – but alas, they juts wanna tell me if I'm hot, which I already know the answer to.
I didn't give it access to my camera but it sounds like it's giving "attractiveness" ratings, but jeez, that's super complex. I imagine this thing is measuring symmetry and proportion, but that'll only get you so far; the "hottest" A-list actors usually have a kind of wabi-sabi quality, with oversized teeth, or an interestingly shaped nose, or a crooked smile. There are also obviously all kinds of attractive, and emotional baggage that factors into what's attractive to people (they're reminded of a parent or childhood crush, etc.)
The most interesting attractiveness-measurer I ever saw was a subreddit where you'd post your own photo, and members of the community would post photos of people who are equal to your own attractiveness, so it effectively threw ego out of the equation.
/r/EqualAttraction seems to be it (I just searched for 'similar attractiveness' on reddit, was the third or fourth result). Now my problem is I don't know any of the celebrities they are naming, so I'll have to google around to see if I agree with the commenters.
I'm pretty sure that was it – when I saw it years ago, there were a few posts that were pretty remarkable, in that somebody "average" looking had uploaded a picture, and someone else would upload a pretty good (non-celeb) match, and in most cases the op would say, "Oh, that's way better than I thought!"
Looking at it now, however, it seems like it's mostly a "what celeb do I vaguely resemble" thread, which isn't nearly as interesting.
So apparently the algorithms say I'm almost 10 years younger than I actually am (late 20s, algos say I'm just about to get my student driver's license).
I wanted to see how much the camera quality affects these scores so I wanted to try on mobile but I can't get it to switch to the front camera.
Nice project :) Too bad it doesn't say how old it thinks you are though (or I missed it) All I know now is that it thinks I lied about my age, which I didn't.
Was that a hoax? It started showing me pictures of dogs in shower caps for some reason, said it was loading and unloading random data sets, then began quizzing me about random things.
Creator here. It sounds like the main face detection algorithm (faceApiJS) wasn't able to load somehow. Then it will just try to keep you entertained by spouting funny loading sentences.
Try refreshing the page, or using a different browser.
The interaction heat map blocks the Skip button. I just wanted to see the score so I skipped all the talk but that also meant that my skipping made me unable to skip after that step.
So then the issue is who has this data, because algorithms are increasingly becoming commodity. Right now the biggest databases are superpowers, big tech , and ordinary countries. One way to remove the competitive advantage of any good or bad actor, is to make the data commonplace, in order to render it worthless, in order to remove the incentive for so much spying.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but this reads to me like "if surveillance doesn't produce a worthwhile society, you're just not using enough of it."
Honestly , i think it's going to get worse before it gets better. People don't see the invisible hand of surveillance at the moment , so they don't push back.
You may enjoy this blogpost I made that goes into how the BMI prediction algorithm was developed. It's the only one in the project that I trained myself.
Like you said, muscles matter quite a bit. It's attractive to use photos af athletes to train the algorithm, because there are a lot of websites that show their photos along with their weight and height (which you need to calculate a BMI). But since muscles weigh so much more than fat, athletes have high BMI with slim bodies, which warps the algorithm.
I didn't use athletes for this reason (it's trained on a diet of 50% Chinese celebrities and 50% American arrest records). But I found projects that do use these photos.
This website doesn't work at all for me (Safari, iOS 13). After asking for permission the video becomes modal and impossible to close, completely hijacking my browser and forcing me to quit the app. That's the state of JS in 2020 I guess.
I suspect someone has tried to manipulate their score. I found one database entry that had only an extreme beauty score. I've hardened the system against this now.
I'm in my late twenties but people always think I'm around like 21 or something, I was very surprised to see that this site also guessed that I was about 22, I would expect a computer to see through that.
I got 7.9 for beauty index which was pretty surprising. I wonder what is the exact average over the whole sample? And who got the 8+ marks? The distribution would definitely be interesting to see.
I was around 5, repositioned my webcam because it/my face was askew, and I shot up to 8.7!
While I am flattered, experience certainly does not match that number.
On the other hand, my life expectancy is in the 60's, despite having a normal BMI.
Accuracy side, I thought the presentation was excellent! I really like the explanation playing while the analysis is taking place. I’m totally going to steal this presentation idea.
Just moving my lamp around (i.e., making my face whiter, I'm guessing?) could add 2-3 points. Putting on glasses could do the same. Not sure what to make of this.
Yeah, if you train a model with pictures of the same person, or maybe their family, you may be able to guess the BMI from the face, after all, the face stores fat in a non linear way.
But I remember back in college a friend was severely overweight and eventually he was motivated to lose weight. Diet and exercise details aside, in a couple of years he became a BMI 28, but very low fat, ripped and chiseled muscled up individual. But interestingly, he mostly kept his fat person face, those cheeks, while they shrank, weren't going away.
the only data I reported was my age... and it had some big misses, like BMI being much less than it really is just because of beard. Also it said my life expentancy is going to be up to 81 years old, when in reality I will live forever :')
Could they be trying to make a point? About insurance abuses of this technology maybe? maybe not, could just be the algorithm failing. Or maybe they don't want to assume the liability of actually providing a number.
Yikes. Thanks, I'll look into it. The terms and conditions have no influence on this, but it could that that one of the scores required to create the life expectancy prediction is missing (age, gender, bmi, country).
Does it fall back to US if the IP address can't be used? Because this would be the first time a GeoIP database would move my EU IP address to the US...
It looks like they're trying to guess at your life expectancy through your country, which they're guessing at using your IP address, which they can only get at if you agreed to the terms and conditions
This is an art project by Tijmen Schep that shows how face detection algoritms are increasingly used to judge you.
No personal data is sent to our server in any way. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. All the face detection algorithms will run on your own computer, in the browser.
In this 'test' your face is compared with that of all the the other people who have previously done this test. At the end of the show you can, if you want to, share some anonimized data. That will then be used to re-calculate the new average. That anonymous data is not shared any further.
I share your concern and decided to not try the website. The site said no personal data is collected, and if we opt to share our data, it would be anonimized. Well yeah, but how about browser fingerprint? is that considered as a personal data? or if it's collected at all?
edit:
Okay, I succumbed to my curiosity and decided to try it but with all my connection turned off. As far as my obeservation goes, at least there are no ajax call from this site and everything is functioning even without connection.
I don't trust elites or any product which quickly gets popular on any form of mainstream media. There is so much dirty money flowing around and most of it goes to lying psychopaths (the selection bias for psychopathy is systemic and seemingly intentional).
Our modern economic growth is founded on coercing people into continuing to accept currencies which keep getting dirtier and which keep losing their value.
It's 100% about coercion, manipulation and gate keeping. If you can't figure out what the product is that they're selling, you're the product.
99% of the cases i would agree with you,I don't even buy laptops with integrated webcams for this very reason;
However, websites with the .eu domain are subject to EU laws (obviously, since you need to be an eu citizen to have such a domain).
Even though i'm not an EU fan (far from it actually),it would be very weird if they'd have such a website and then not comply with data requests for deletion/download, especially when they boast about it being an EU-funded website that respects privacy.
This is correct. .EU domain registration have several restrictions on them, one of which is full disclosure of who you are. I would trust a .eu website, over a .com anyday.
I wanna say I'm disappointed, but I'd be lying. I'm happy that A.I. cannot detect us black people. I'll need to do something about that left ear though.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21337863