Tech Behind Fake Faces

In the era of social media, you must have posted a photo of yourself on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, etc., So, what’s new about that? Artificial Intelligence (AI) can use a Facial Recognition technology and create your fake twin! Alarmed by the fact, there are apps and companies that work to collect our photographs posted on social media sites to create a massive facial recognition database.

This reminds how naive we are! The digital world is selling kinds of stuff to us by inducing the urge of trying it versus wanting it, and in this attempt, we lose ourselves and our identity. We fall flat to our face and buy apps and tools, not knowing we are mere victims.

We often think it is cool to play with apps that shows versions of us, looking young and old, wearing spectacles and not, with beard and moustaches, with wrinkles and wrinkle-free! We are all in it, playing with these kinds of reckless apps, thinking it is mere fun not really understanding its consequences.

Moreover, in a hurry to explore the new app, not knowing the terms and conditions, we just install it on our smart devices. Thereby, selling our right to privacy by sharing our personal details. In the future, just for enabling the checkmark and accepting the Terms & Conditions as is without reading it, you will not be entitled to fight for your own rights.

On the other end, companies like Generated Media acclaim that they have built an original machine learning dataset and used StyleGAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) to construct a realistic set of 100,000 faces. They allege that their database is built by taking 29,000+ photos of 69 different models over the last 2 years in their studio.

After shooting the photographs, the team uses Machine Learning model creation and scripting for mass image generation to create fake faces. Now, they have photographs of people of different ages and appearances who look real, but in reality, they are not and will never be. They share the photographs for free @ Generated Photos.

If photographs from Generated Media can be used for training or educational purpose it is healthy, but what if they want real people to upload their pictures and experiment with it using AI technology? Fake faces are tagged with high risks and can be used for deceptive purposes. Cyber-criminals can have access to face generating GANS and build their own face-generation apps. They can use it at the Airports clearing facial recognition checks and walk-by innocently camouflaging their identity using a real twin feature of someone you know.

When given a choice, choose what is right to protect your rights.

Ask yourself these questions.

• Should your rights to privacy end?

• What should you do to secure your privacy?

• When your real face is faked or twinned using AI, is there a way to stop it?

If you have answers to these questions and feel safe staying anonymous with a fake face, then you are ‘IN’ for the Facial Recognition AI technology experiments. If not, pause to think, the photographs we upload can be collected and used unethically, and ‘only you’ can stop this digital abuse. Say ‘NO’ to the misuse of facial recognition technology.