Filmmaker Jesse Rosten created this satirical commercial for Fotoshop by Adobé with the tagline “This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.” It’s a humorous response to how the beauty industry has distorted our society’s perception of beauty through ubiquitous Photoshopping. The video may or may not be work safe, depending on where you work.
(via Fstoppers)
Facial recognition features are appearing in everything from cameras to photo-sharing sites, but have you thought about the different security and privacy concerns it introduces? Fast Company has published a piece on how mobile apps in the future may be able to quickly look up your identity, your personal information, and perhaps even your social security number!
[CMU researchers] used three relatively simple technologies to create their face recognition system: An off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing processing, and personal data available through the public feed at social networking sites such as Facebook [...] Combining the data gathered from the face recognizer hardware with clever search algorithms that were processed on a cloud-computing platform, the team has performed three powerful experiments: They were able to “unmask” people on a popular dating site where it’s common to protect real identities using pseudonyms, and they ID’d students walking in public on campus by grabbing their profile photos from Facebook.
Most impressively the research algorithm tried to predict personal interests and even to deduce the social security number of CMU students based solely on an image of their face–by interrogating deeper into information that’s freely available online.
You might want to invest in a pair of censorship sunglasses after all!
Your Face Is Your Key [Fast Company]
Image credit: Face Detection Example (Bogdan and Anne) by mr. ‘sto
We’ve already got plenty of gadgets designed to facilitate photography: there’s auto-focus, face detection, and some crazy features in Photoshop that can effortlessly add and remove entire elements (and people) in photographs. So now why not have a camera that tells you whether you’re taking an aesthetically pleasing photograph?
Designer Andrew Kupresanin created this project camera that utilizes the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine Acquine to judge photo quality even before you take a photograph. The screen in the back of the camera simply shows a percentage rating, in lieu of an LCD display. The camera is actually a Nokia N73 camera connected with a Mac over Bluetooth. Kupresanin seems to be using his experimental project to make a poignant statement about the automation of photography and aesthetics. Kupresanin says on his site:
Within pop culture and society artificial intelligence has been a topic that is approached with hope, fear, cynicism, curiosity and caution. However many intelligent devices have already been effortlessly absorbed into our culture and everyday lives.
