Are You You?

Dutch artist Tijmen Schep has crea­ted an online game around face recog­ni­tion tech­no­logy called areyouyou.eu. The game challen­ges you to fool a face recog­ni­tion algo­rithm by crea­ting funny faces.

The game lets you expe­ri­ence how well – or how poorly – these face recog­ni­tion systems work. For one thing, the algo­rithms are almost never 100% certain. Unfor­tu­na­tely these matches are often taken very seri­ously by law enfor­ce­ment. In 2019 this lead to the first publi­ci­sed false arrest. In 2020 an inno­cent man from New Jersey spent the night in jail because the police could not be convin­ced their tech­no­logy might have made a mistake.

Not only does the game ques­tion the reli­a­bi­lity of the tech­no­logy, it also points to further issue: people might self-censor their beha­vi­our because they fear the may be trac­ked, and this could lead to reper­cus­si­ons. For exam­ple, would you be be less likely to visit the Red Light District or join a protest march if you knew there were face recog­ni­tion came­ra’s watching you, and your presence there might be used against you at some later date?

AreYouYou was made possi­ble with support from the Euro­pean Union. For the past two years Schep has been working as an artist in resi­dence with Sherpa, a Euro­pean rese­arch consor­tium that advi­ses the Euro­pean Commis­sion on how AI systems might better protect human rights. One of SHER­PA’s recom­men­da­ti­ons is to create a ban on large scale urban face recog­ni­tion systems.

Currently there is a wider Euro­pean campaign to limit the use of face recog­ni­tion tech­no­logy in public spaces, called «Reclaim your face». This game supports that campaign.

The work is a follow-up to “How Normal Am I?”, an inter­ac­tive docu­men­tary about face detec­tion tech­no­logy that was laun­ched in Octo­ber, and has since been viewed over 650.000 times.

Try it your­self at www.AreYouYou.eu

Anot­her project: How normal am I?