13 ms·

Stealing Ur Feelings

372 points by simonpure 7y ago

rrsmtz 7y ago
Creepy proof-of-concept. Are there devices which have been proven to capture image data when not in a camera mode, or is there an assumption that they're somehow doing it covertly?
- salsadip 7y ago
  Not on a mobile device, but I read that some company is using OpenCV to judge customers reactions to ads shown to them. that is, ads shown on TVs in stores and recording the reactions with a hidden camera and evaluating right away. Wish I could give more details but I can’t find the source any more
inerte 7y ago
I don't know how much this website can improve the general public understanding of how much companies and governments can deduce from a small set of data about an individual, but this concept was presented in an interesting way on the website. "An AI that knows you better than you know yourself" - I know SV loves the apocalyptic Noah Harari, but that's exactly what he's been talking about. One of his possible scenarios is that this rapid processing of data by a centralized entity can erode modern individual freedom (including free will and free markets) since it will be more efficient than individuals maximizing their interests. If the centralized processing of data can feed more people, provide security, and in general runs things more smoothly, we collective might accept that route, and gladly give up the power we hold on a democracy (whatever that amount you believe actually exists).
- Konnstann 7y ago
  If the "smooth" option is feeding into people's biases, that doesn't seem like a good thing. For stuff like dogs or pizzas curating content based on AI is harmless, but once you get into racial and gender biases, with the given example of suggesting dating profiles, the effects on the outside world can be disastrous. Implicit bias is neither a positive or a negative thing assuming you are aware of and combat it when it has a negative impact, but businesses don't care about that and just want more clicks/buys/swipes/etc.
nlh 7y ago
First, this is excellent and very well done (the analysis wasn't great for me, but whatever - point made). The part that bothers me so much about this all is the sense of hopelessness it leaves. Why? Because 99.9% of people literally, actually, truly, genuinely Just Don't Care. It's like they're all rats in a Skinner Box -- so long as the feed keeps scrolling and the dopamine keeps getting pumped out, why does it matter if they're being analyzed, bought, and sold? More feed, more likes, more dopamine, more feed, more likes... Sigh.
- kleer001 7y ago
  > genuinely Just Don't Care short term focus makes sense to me in an evolutionary context, the future is quite uncertain
- malvosenior 7y ago
  > It's like they're all rats in a Skinner Box We're all rats in a Skinner Box. Just like me, you gave this site access to your camera and let it scan your face for minutes so you could see the result. I don't think it's fair to judge other people for not caring about privacy immediately after uploading your likeness to a random site.
  - warrenpj 7y ago
    I read the privacy policy before using it. I guess it doesn't upload anything. Is it naive to trust the privacy policy stated here? https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/master/privacy_policy.md https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/ma... > The information is processed locally in your browser and is never transmitted or stored externally.
    - malvosenior 7y ago
      I would say if you are very concerned about privacy, you should never grant a website or app access to your camera. I'm not, so it's no big deal to me, but the parent poster seems to be.
scarejunba 7y ago
Haha, this is awesome! It does showcase a beautiful world, though! Imagine if you walk into a department store and they already know if you're the kind of person who likes to be greeted vs left alone to browse. Or using median commuter feeling to make commutes better. We could find unusual things. For instance, maybe people would like trains coloured brightly on average. Who knows! The positive possibilities are endless. We could engineer general contentment for all without drug usage. EDIT: Since I'm rate limited, here's my response to below comment People are always engineering your contentment. Stand-up comics, your wife, the people at your favourite coffee shop, the bookstore you visit. It's a good thing. It's the lubricant of society.
- kempbellt 7y ago
  >We could engineer general contentment for all without drug usage. The idea that other people are engineering my contentment, is a truly terrifying notion. I imagine this technology will predominantly be used for increasing the effectiveness of ads by attempting to put pixels in front of your face that spike dopamine output and attempt to persuade you to pay for something to get another dopamine spike. Essentially creating the same effect, but in a more subversive manner than a consumed drug.
- hiei 7y ago
  What do you mean by rate limited?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    My account has a rate-limit flag on it that prevents it from posting too often. It's a silent flag and I know why it's there (I'm often downvoted[0]) so I don't know until I send a message whether it will make it. Unfortunately, that often prevents me from replying to people. When I do I receive a message "You are posting too fast". 0: Not complaining about this, just explaining.
    - asudosandwich 7y ago
      Disciplined by a technicolor behavior algorithm and not told about it. How appropriate!
malvosenior 7y ago
> reveals how your favorite apps can use facial emotion recognition technology to make decisions about your life, promote inequalities, and even destabilize American democracy. I must have missed the part of this where they show how AI promotes inequalities and destabilizes American democracy. They showed me dogs, pizza and a bunch of pixelated people from the 90s. What this demonstrated to me was that AI is probably worse than noise. It provided zero insight into who I am or how I feel other than getting it correct when I smiled. I also think the people that made this are missing a huge piece of the puzzle... For most people the issue isn't that they are being tracked, it's that no one is paying attention to them. People want to be analyzed. They want their existence to be recognized and they want it having an impact on the world. The worst thing that could happen is that no one cares. Even if it's an algorithm scanning their facial features to better sell them pizza, I think most people would desire that. Case in point: we all just took this test to see what it thought about us.
- about_help 7y ago
  Some weird narcissism you're selling to convince people they shouldn't care about privacy. Immediately refuted by everyone's real world experience with visible privacy violations.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    I'm not selling anything. I don't think my point was refuted. I think it was verified by how many people (including myself) just gave a random website camera access and let it scan our faces.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      How many people did give it access? I didn't.
    - leppr 7y ago
      Your point isn't verified because it can be explained by other reasons (curiosity about its effectiveness seems likely, especially given the nature of this community). The effect you describe is certainly real, but you only have to look at the present reality to see just how far it extends. In modern society, people are mostly not comfortable sharing their intimate thoughts with random service workers. And that's with individual humans, with faceless machine networks the tolerance might be lower.
samat 7y ago
Do any popular mobile apps capture camera info while you are say scrolling the feed?
- streulpita 7y ago
  yes, this is what tik tok is most famous for
  - anchpop 7y ago
    I googled and didn't see anything about this, is this true?
    - hiei 7y ago
      https://www.techinasia.com/bytedance-overseas-expansion-strategy-break-down https://www.techinasia.com/bytedance-overseas-expansion-stra... Scroll down to "dual learning"
      - jazzyjackson 7y ago
        I don't see any mention of 'camera' or 'face' in this article, interesting tho it is...
        hiei 7y ago
        ah I misread OP, thought we were discussing something else.
  - truebosko 7y ago
    That's terrifying. Is it known/clear to the user that the camera is on?
    - Arbalest 7y ago
      No, but some recent versions of Android allow you to disable camera access to specific apps. Unfortunately, always ask every time isn't enough of an option. Simply don't use apps that refuse to work without the camera permission.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
I'm impressed by how well it got my income. Really cool art project for something running entirely in browser.
zug_zug 7y ago
Outstanding multimedia article. Very cool attempt at multimedia persuasion. However hard to take at face-value (pun intended) when its analysis was so incorrect.
- topher-the-geek 7y ago
  Agreed. They concluded I don't like dogs. I love dogs. What I don't like is not being able to find my mouse pointer in that noisey background. Hahaha. Nice try AI
irrational 7y ago
Everyone says my face shows no emotion and they can never tell what I'm feeling (and when they try to guess they are wrong 9/10). I'd love to know what this would say about me. If this can tell what I'm feeling then that would be awesome. Headline: Computers are better at detecting human emotion than humans.
- gregoryl 7y ago
  I took the bullet for you; I have a similar lack of expression. It just outputs very low confidence results, so the end result is junk. That said, I think that drives the point home even harder, as its built a profile based on incorrect data.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  haha yes same. women try to guess my intentions and fail spectacularly when I'm largely indifferent close friends try to understand if I'm annoyed when I'm largely indifferent but my smile gets me into all the rooms I want to be in, so thats great! the sociopath reddit told me to gtfo because I'm clearly not one, so that had an odd relieving sting to it but I should have predicted that they would lack empathy
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  In some parts, the player shows raw scores for emotions, and one of them is "neutral". I was 99.9999% neutral or more for the entire event, never breaking my apparent poker face until it called me possibly brain damaged at the end, which I found funny for some reason. The claims about IQ and left/right leaning are possibly arbitrary and just meant to stir discussion and virality. For it to be any amount confident in it's claims, I imagine you need to be at least somewhat expressive. However, I don't expect most users of the average NN classifier to pay more than a little attention to how often what they classify something as is less than 80% confident.
  - xtracto 7y ago
    > The claims about IQ and left/right leaning are possibly arbitrary and just meant to stir discussion and virality. Yeah, I found it very amusing that this thing concluded I was highly republican. First, I am not from the USA, second I am strongly for social programs/socialist, and third, current USA republicans amuse me (in that, what they are doing is funny to see from outside).
1023bytes 7y ago
I was interested how are they doing the "IQ estimation", here it is: -(dogPos + Math.abs(menPos - womenPos) + Math.abs(whiteNegative - nonWhiteNegative) + kanyePos)
- qqii 7y ago
  After seeing no code in their repo I was interested in the same. The important parts are in https://stealingurfeelin.gs/js/events.min.js https://stealingurfeelin.gs/js/events.min.js You've left out some important parts of the iq calculation, with the full equation being: reactions = dogPos + Math.abs(menPos - womenPos) + Math.abs(whiteNegative - nonWhiteNegative) + kanyePos) / 4; iq = Math.floor(15 * -((reactions - 0.0005) / 0.05) + 100); if (iq < 100) { thatPartBitSFX.play() } else { thatPartWaySFX.play() } Also amusingly rebulican percentage is calculated as: reactions = (dogPos + kanyePos + nonWhiteNegative) / 3; republicanPct = 50 + 15 * ((reactions - 0.05) / 0.1), And income is calculated as: reactions = (iq / 100 + republicanPct / 50 + dogPos) / 3 estimatedIncome = Math.floor(200000 * (reactions - 0.5) + 31099), if (estimatedIncome < 31099) { isPoorSFX.play() } else { isNotPoorSFX.play() }
  - PastaMonster 7y ago
    Oh dear. Lots of magic numbers. The programmers are not educated properly. Just horrible code.
    - spiznnx 7y ago
      NNs are full of magic numbers that were learned from training sets.
    - testvox 7y ago
      This is minified code, so couldn't the minifier have replaced the constants with their values or something?
      - 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
ibudiallo 7y ago
There is a case to be made about how good the AI behind emotional detection is. When you take the test, it will be accurate for some, and blissfully wrong for others. More so wrong for most. I took the test (or unknowingly took it) and it was correct for the most part. And it got some things wrong. I love dogs. The trouble is not that the AI can be wrong, it's that we will rely on its answers to make decisions. When the facial recognition software combines your facial expression and your name, while you are walking under the bridge late at night, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and you are black; Your terrorist score is at 52%. A police car is dispatched. In 2017, my contract was not transferred to the new system. The automated system saw that an ex employee was scanning his key cards multiple times. Security was dispatched to catch the rogue employee. Now a simple questioning should have cleared things up, but the computer had already flagged me as troublesome. Long story short, I was fired. When the machine calculates your emotions, the results are unquestionable. Or, we don't know how it got to the answer, so we trust that it is right. It is a computer after all. What scares me is not how fast machine learning is being deployed to every aspect of our lives. My scare is our reaction to it.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  The problem with all current "AI"-driven systems be it facial recognition, voice recognition, translating, fraud detection, navigation, whatever, is that they are not 100% right, and when they're wrong, they're hilariously devastatingly super-wrong in a way that humans are not wrong. But since the success modes are good and human-like, we assume that the failures are going to be human-like as well, but the failure-modes of these system are usually bizarre and alien. Take self-driving accidents, for example. Pretty much all of them happen in situations that no human would fail in, and that's obvious to most people, but then we're forgetting about all the other mistakes similar "AI" systems make, and don't realize that they're also failures no human would make.
  - taneq 7y ago
    > in a way that humans are not wrong. I dunno... from the parent post: > you are walking under the bridge late at night, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and you are black; Your terrorist score is at 52% That sounds like a pretty human failure mode to me.
ipsum2 7y ago
Really cool demo! Though the part about companies using facial recognition to determine what to show you on your feed /results (presumably Facebook, Youtube, Google) is pure FUD, which is disappointing and probably should be made clearer that it's a hypothetical.
- csande17 7y ago
  Back when Apple first announced Face ID and Animojis, there were vague rumors/fears that companies would use the face-recognition sensors for targeting like that. Did that ever actually happen? (Come to think of it, is it even possible to know for sure? Do apps need a permission prompt to access the facial-recognition data?)
twodave 7y ago
What’s scary to me is how wildly wrong this was at describing me. If anyone is ever going to be making decisions for me based on this tech, it has a ways to go.
tambourine_man 7y ago
A lot of the good stuff seems to be coming from: https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js Results are poor, as expected. I think the author intends it as a joke. But the message is spot on.
digitalacetone 7y ago
I hope u guys caught my bathtub video.
quangio 7y ago
This AI is highly inaccurate: AI predicts I don't like dogs & like men (/r/suddenlygay after I shaved). I hope that's the author's point. The worst thing about AI is that people believe AI is god that makes unbiased prediction. E.g. Big companies use Pymetrics and HireVue for their "unbiased" hiring practice is a joke. May be a few years from now, AI will become a classic for software bugs just like Therac-25 (but developed by mostly top programmers)
jonny383 7y ago
I don't see this any more accurate than just taking random numbers and displaying the mapped result back to the user.
brisky 7y ago
After watching this I realized that we need to update mobile app permissions model to distinguish between front and back camera access. I can see many cases where I would grant the app back facing camera permissions but would not give it front facing camera access.
cbanek 7y ago
I thought the content of this was really interesting, although the results were actually way off. I love pizza, for one thing. Although, to be honest, their picture of pizza did not look very tasty. I also wonder how these results would be affected by being alone vs being in groups. Kind of like laughing (people tend to laugh more when with other people or in social situations rather than alone), emotional reactions can be very different depending on environment / social situation, even when you feel exactly the same about something.
blue_devil 7y ago
>>So our goal was to make an interactive doc that had the silly, sarcastic, collaged aesthetic of a vlogger video — and our central tech trick — using AI to tell you secrets about yourself — was designed to function like one of those viral BuzzFeed personality quizzes. It definitely hits some kind of addictive pattern. I felt the pull to "try it out". But I didn't. Just imagined what I'd learn from it if I shared my data (likely nothing), and that dampened my enthusiasm.

372 points by simonpure 7y ago

Creepy proof-of-concept. Are there devices which have been proven to capture image data when not in a camera mode, or is there an assumption that they're somehow doing it covertly?

salsadip 7y ago
Not on a mobile device, but I read that some company is using OpenCV to judge customers reactions to ads shown to them. that is, ads shown on TVs in stores and recording the reactions with a hidden camera and evaluating right away. Wish I could give more details but I can’t find the source any more

inerte 7y ago

I don't know how much this website can improve the general public understanding of how much companies and governments can deduce from a small set of data about an individual, but this concept was presented in an interesting way on the website. "An AI that knows you better than you know yourself" - I know SV loves the apocalyptic Noah Harari, but that's exactly what he's been talking about. One of his possible scenarios is that this rapid processing of data by a centralized entity can erode modern individual freedom (including free will and free markets) since it will be more efficient than individuals maximizing their interests. If the centralized processing of data can feed more people, provide security, and in general runs things more smoothly, we collective might accept that route, and gladly give up the power we hold on a democracy (whatever that amount you believe actually exists).

Konnstann 7y ago
If the "smooth" option is feeding into people's biases, that doesn't seem like a good thing. For stuff like dogs or pizzas curating content based on AI is harmless, but once you get into racial and gender biases, with the given example of suggesting dating profiles, the effects on the outside world can be disastrous. Implicit bias is neither a positive or a negative thing assuming you are aware of and combat it when it has a negative impact, but businesses don't care about that and just want more clicks/buys/swipes/etc.

nlh 7y ago

First, this is excellent and very well done (the analysis wasn't great for me, but whatever - point made). The part that bothers me so much about this all is the sense of hopelessness it leaves. Why? Because 99.9% of people literally, actually, truly, genuinely Just Don't Care. It's like they're all rats in a Skinner Box -- so long as the feed keeps scrolling and the dopamine keeps getting pumped out, why does it matter if they're being analyzed, bought, and sold? More feed, more likes, more dopamine, more feed, more likes... Sigh.

kleer001 7y ago
> genuinely Just Don't Care short term focus makes sense to me in an evolutionary context, the future is quite uncertain
malvosenior 7y ago
> It's like they're all rats in a Skinner Box We're all rats in a Skinner Box. Just like me, you gave this site access to your camera and let it scan your face for minutes so you could see the result. I don't think it's fair to judge other people for not caring about privacy immediately after uploading your likeness to a random site.
- warrenpj 7y ago
  I read the privacy policy before using it. I guess it doesn't upload anything. Is it naive to trust the privacy policy stated here? https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/master/privacy_policy.md https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/ma... > The information is processed locally in your browser and is never transmitted or stored externally.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    I would say if you are very concerned about privacy, you should never grant a website or app access to your camera. I'm not, so it's no big deal to me, but the parent poster seems to be.

scarejunba 7y ago

Haha, this is awesome! It does showcase a beautiful world, though! Imagine if you walk into a department store and they already know if you're the kind of person who likes to be greeted vs left alone to browse. Or using median commuter feeling to make commutes better. We could find unusual things. For instance, maybe people would like trains coloured brightly on average. Who knows! The positive possibilities are endless. We could engineer general contentment for all without drug usage. EDIT: Since I'm rate limited, here's my response to below comment People are always engineering your contentment. Stand-up comics, your wife, the people at your favourite coffee shop, the bookstore you visit. It's a good thing. It's the lubricant of society.

kempbellt 7y ago
>We could engineer general contentment for all without drug usage. The idea that other people are engineering my contentment, is a truly terrifying notion. I imagine this technology will predominantly be used for increasing the effectiveness of ads by attempting to put pixels in front of your face that spike dopamine output and attempt to persuade you to pay for something to get another dopamine spike. Essentially creating the same effect, but in a more subversive manner than a consumed drug.
hiei 7y ago
What do you mean by rate limited?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  My account has a rate-limit flag on it that prevents it from posting too often. It's a silent flag and I know why it's there (I'm often downvoted[0]) so I don't know until I send a message whether it will make it. Unfortunately, that often prevents me from replying to people. When I do I receive a message "You are posting too fast". 0: Not complaining about this, just explaining.
  - asudosandwich 7y ago
    Disciplined by a technicolor behavior algorithm and not told about it. How appropriate!

malvosenior 7y ago

> reveals how your favorite apps can use facial emotion recognition technology to make decisions about your life, promote inequalities, and even destabilize American democracy. I must have missed the part of this where they show how AI promotes inequalities and destabilizes American democracy. They showed me dogs, pizza and a bunch of pixelated people from the 90s. What this demonstrated to me was that AI is probably worse than noise. It provided zero insight into who I am or how I feel other than getting it correct when I smiled. I also think the people that made this are missing a huge piece of the puzzle... For most people the issue isn't that they are being tracked, it's that no one is paying attention to them. People want to be analyzed. They want their existence to be recognized and they want it having an impact on the world. The worst thing that could happen is that no one cares. Even if it's an algorithm scanning their facial features to better sell them pizza, I think most people would desire that. Case in point: we all just took this test to see what it thought about us.

about_help 7y ago
Some weird narcissism you're selling to convince people they shouldn't care about privacy. Immediately refuted by everyone's real world experience with visible privacy violations.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  I'm not selling anything. I don't think my point was refuted. I think it was verified by how many people (including myself) just gave a random website camera access and let it scan our faces.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    How many people did give it access? I didn't.
  - leppr 7y ago
    Your point isn't verified because it can be explained by other reasons (curiosity about its effectiveness seems likely, especially given the nature of this community). The effect you describe is certainly real, but you only have to look at the present reality to see just how far it extends. In modern society, people are mostly not comfortable sharing their intimate thoughts with random service workers. And that's with individual humans, with faceless machine networks the tolerance might be lower.

samat 7y ago

Do any popular mobile apps capture camera info while you are say scrolling the feed?

streulpita 7y ago
yes, this is what tik tok is most famous for
- anchpop 7y ago
  I googled and didn't see anything about this, is this true?
  - hiei 7y ago
    https://www.techinasia.com/bytedance-overseas-expansion-strategy-break-down https://www.techinasia.com/bytedance-overseas-expansion-stra... Scroll down to "dual learning"
    - jazzyjackson 7y ago
      I don't see any mention of 'camera' or 'face' in this article, interesting tho it is...
      - hiei 7y ago
        ah I misread OP, thought we were discussing something else.
- truebosko 7y ago
  That's terrifying. Is it known/clear to the user that the camera is on?
  - Arbalest 7y ago
    No, but some recent versions of Android allow you to disable camera access to specific apps. Unfortunately, always ask every time isn't enough of an option. Simply don't use apps that refuse to work without the camera permission.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

I'm impressed by how well it got my income. Really cool art project for something running entirely in browser.

zug_zug 7y ago

Outstanding multimedia article. Very cool attempt at multimedia persuasion. However hard to take at face-value (pun intended) when its analysis was so incorrect.

topher-the-geek 7y ago
Agreed. They concluded I don't like dogs. I love dogs. What I don't like is not being able to find my mouse pointer in that noisey background. Hahaha. Nice try AI

irrational 7y ago

Everyone says my face shows no emotion and they can never tell what I'm feeling (and when they try to guess they are wrong 9/10). I'd love to know what this would say about me. If this can tell what I'm feeling then that would be awesome. Headline: Computers are better at detecting human emotion than humans.

gregoryl 7y ago
I took the bullet for you; I have a similar lack of expression. It just outputs very low confidence results, so the end result is junk. That said, I think that drives the point home even harder, as its built a profile based on incorrect data.
rolltiide 7y ago
haha yes same. women try to guess my intentions and fail spectacularly when I'm largely indifferent close friends try to understand if I'm annoyed when I'm largely indifferent but my smile gets me into all the rooms I want to be in, so thats great! the sociopath reddit told me to gtfo because I'm clearly not one, so that had an odd relieving sting to it but I should have predicted that they would lack empathy
mrguyorama 7y ago
In some parts, the player shows raw scores for emotions, and one of them is "neutral". I was 99.9999% neutral or more for the entire event, never breaking my apparent poker face until it called me possibly brain damaged at the end, which I found funny for some reason. The claims about IQ and left/right leaning are possibly arbitrary and just meant to stir discussion and virality. For it to be any amount confident in it's claims, I imagine you need to be at least somewhat expressive. However, I don't expect most users of the average NN classifier to pay more than a little attention to how often what they classify something as is less than 80% confident.
- xtracto 7y ago
  > The claims about IQ and left/right leaning are possibly arbitrary and just meant to stir discussion and virality. Yeah, I found it very amusing that this thing concluded I was highly republican. First, I am not from the USA, second I am strongly for social programs/socialist, and third, current USA republicans amuse me (in that, what they are doing is funny to see from outside).

1023bytes 7y ago

I was interested how are they doing the "IQ estimation", here it is: -(dogPos + Math.abs(menPos - womenPos) + Math.abs(whiteNegative - nonWhiteNegative) + kanyePos)

qqii 7y ago
After seeing no code in their repo I was interested in the same. The important parts are in https://stealingurfeelin.gs/js/events.min.js https://stealingurfeelin.gs/js/events.min.js You've left out some important parts of the iq calculation, with the full equation being: reactions = dogPos + Math.abs(menPos - womenPos) + Math.abs(whiteNegative - nonWhiteNegative) + kanyePos) / 4; iq = Math.floor(15 * -((reactions - 0.0005) / 0.05) + 100); if (iq < 100) { thatPartBitSFX.play() } else { thatPartWaySFX.play() } Also amusingly rebulican percentage is calculated as: reactions = (dogPos + kanyePos + nonWhiteNegative) / 3; republicanPct = 50 + 15 * ((reactions - 0.05) / 0.1), And income is calculated as: reactions = (iq / 100 + republicanPct / 50 + dogPos) / 3 estimatedIncome = Math.floor(200000 * (reactions - 0.5) + 31099), if (estimatedIncome < 31099) { isPoorSFX.play() } else { isNotPoorSFX.play() }
- PastaMonster 7y ago
  Oh dear. Lots of magic numbers. The programmers are not educated properly. Just horrible code.
  - spiznnx 7y ago
    NNs are full of magic numbers that were learned from training sets.
  - testvox 7y ago
    This is minified code, so couldn't the minifier have replaced the constants with their values or something?
    - 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago

ibudiallo 7y ago

There is a case to be made about how good the AI behind emotional detection is. When you take the test, it will be accurate for some, and blissfully wrong for others. More so wrong for most. I took the test (or unknowingly took it) and it was correct for the most part. And it got some things wrong. I love dogs. The trouble is not that the AI can be wrong, it's that we will rely on its answers to make decisions. When the facial recognition software combines your facial expression and your name, while you are walking under the bridge late at night, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and you are black; Your terrorist score is at 52%. A police car is dispatched. In 2017, my contract was not transferred to the new system. The automated system saw that an ex employee was scanning his key cards multiple times. Security was dispatched to catch the rogue employee. Now a simple questioning should have cleared things up, but the computer had already flagged me as troublesome. Long story short, I was fired. When the machine calculates your emotions, the results are unquestionable. Or, we don't know how it got to the answer, so we trust that it is right. It is a computer after all. What scares me is not how fast machine learning is being deployed to every aspect of our lives. My scare is our reaction to it.

henrikschroder 7y ago
The problem with all current "AI"-driven systems be it facial recognition, voice recognition, translating, fraud detection, navigation, whatever, is that they are not 100% right, and when they're wrong, they're hilariously devastatingly super-wrong in a way that humans are not wrong. But since the success modes are good and human-like, we assume that the failures are going to be human-like as well, but the failure-modes of these system are usually bizarre and alien. Take self-driving accidents, for example. Pretty much all of them happen in situations that no human would fail in, and that's obvious to most people, but then we're forgetting about all the other mistakes similar "AI" systems make, and don't realize that they're also failures no human would make.
- taneq 7y ago
  > in a way that humans are not wrong. I dunno... from the parent post: > you are walking under the bridge late at night, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and you are black; Your terrorist score is at 52% That sounds like a pretty human failure mode to me.

ipsum2 7y ago

Really cool demo! Though the part about companies using facial recognition to determine what to show you on your feed /results (presumably Facebook, Youtube, Google) is pure FUD, which is disappointing and probably should be made clearer that it's a hypothetical.

csande17 7y ago
Back when Apple first announced Face ID and Animojis, there were vague rumors/fears that companies would use the face-recognition sensors for targeting like that. Did that ever actually happen? (Come to think of it, is it even possible to know for sure? Do apps need a permission prompt to access the facial-recognition data?)

twodave 7y ago

What’s scary to me is how wildly wrong this was at describing me. If anyone is ever going to be making decisions for me based on this tech, it has a ways to go.

tambourine_man 7y ago

A lot of the good stuff seems to be coming from: https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js Results are poor, as expected. I think the author intends it as a joke. But the message is spot on.

digitalacetone 7y ago

I hope u guys caught my bathtub video.

quangio 7y ago

This AI is highly inaccurate: AI predicts I don't like dogs & like men (/r/suddenlygay after I shaved). I hope that's the author's point. The worst thing about AI is that people believe AI is god that makes unbiased prediction. E.g. Big companies use Pymetrics and HireVue for their "unbiased" hiring practice is a joke. May be a few years from now, AI will become a classic for software bugs just like Therac-25 (but developed by mostly top programmers)

jonny383 7y ago

I don't see this any more accurate than just taking random numbers and displaying the mapped result back to the user.

brisky 7y ago

After watching this I realized that we need to update mobile app permissions model to distinguish between front and back camera access. I can see many cases where I would grant the app back facing camera permissions but would not give it front facing camera access.

cbanek 7y ago

I thought the content of this was really interesting, although the results were actually way off. I love pizza, for one thing. Although, to be honest, their picture of pizza did not look very tasty. I also wonder how these results would be affected by being alone vs being in groups. Kind of like laughing (people tend to laugh more when with other people or in social situations rather than alone), emotional reactions can be very different depending on environment / social situation, even when you feel exactly the same about something.

blue_devil 7y ago

>>So our goal was to make an interactive doc that had the silly, sarcastic, collaged aesthetic of a vlogger video — and our central tech trick — using AI to tell you secrets about yourself — was designed to function like one of those viral BuzzFeed personality quizzes. It definitely hits some kind of addictive pattern. I felt the pull to "try it out". But I didn't. Just imagined what I'd learn from it if I shared my data (likely nothing), and that dampened my enthusiasm.