Social media users could use a face-generating artificial intelligence system to hide their identity in other people鈥檚 photos.
Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram let users decide whether they are tagged in photos. However, there is no way to stop other users sharing those photos, which is a problem 鈥� especially given the increasing power of facial recognition AI technology, which can search the web for photos of any individual.
鈥淓ven if you untag your face, [the pictures] are online forever,鈥� says at Intel Labs. 鈥淔aces are the most important biodata, and we need to have control over it.鈥�
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Demir and her colleagues have developed a method that uses deepfakes 鈥� fake faces generated by artificial intelligence 鈥� to obscure a person鈥檚 appearance on social media depending on who is viewing the photo.
The system, called My Face My Choice, stores a digital representation of a person鈥檚 face and produces an AI-generated synthetic version according to that person鈥檚 privacy settings. The synthetic face can be modified to make it more or less similar to a person鈥檚 real face.
The tool is intended to give people anonymity by hiding their faces from anyone they don鈥檛 want to see them. But it could also have a much bigger benefit for online privacy, by undermining facial recognition programs that harvest photos of faces from the internet to train such systems. These programs use a stored catalogue of unique face data, known as a 鈥渇ace space鈥�, to match photos with people they have seen before.
鈥淚nstead of trying to decide between 8 billion people, let鈥檚 say all of us have thousands of other faces, then it actually explodes the face space of the facial recognition algorithms,鈥� says Demir.
Using deepfakes as a privacy enhancing tool is a significant idea, says at University College London. 鈥淚 think the results in the paper show that it鈥檚 achievable,鈥� he says.
However, there are still technical hurdles to be overcome before it can be deployed on a very large social network like Facebook, such as storage and security needs. Also, it is unclear whether there would be enough demand from social media users who want their face obscured to strangers, says Griffin.
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