How to Stop AI from Recognizing Your Face in Selfies

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

How to stop AI from recognizing your face in selfies:

A number of AI researchers are pushing back and developing ways to make sure AIs can't learn from personal data. Two of the latest are being presented this week at ICLR, a leading AI conference.

"I don't like people taking things from me that they're not supposed to have," says Emily Wenger at the University of Chicago, who developed one of the first tools to do this, called Fawkes, with her colleagues last summer: "I guess a lot of us had a similar idea at the same time."

[...] "This technology can be used as a key by an individual to lock their data," says Daniel Ma at Deakin University in Australia. "It's a new frontline defense for protecting people's digital rights in the age of AI."

[...] Most of the tools, including Fawkes, take the same basic approach. They make tiny changes to an image that are hard to spot with a human eye but throw off an AI, causing it to misidentify who or what it sees in a photo.

Give Fawkes a bunch of selfies and it will add pixel-level perturbations to the images that stop state-of-the-art facial recognition systems from identifying who is in the photos.

Wenger and her colleagues tested their tool against several widely used commercial facial recognition systems, including Amazon's AWS Rekognition, Microsoft Azure, and Face++, developed by the Chinese company Megvii Technology. In a small experiment with a data set of 50 images, Fawkes was 100% effective against all of them, preventing models trained on tweaked images of people from later recognizing images of those people in fresh images.

Fawkes has already been downloaded nearly half a million times from the project website.

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