Gadgets
Here Are 2 Tools to Prevent Facial Recognition AI From Using Your Selfie
Two of these methods were presented last week at the International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR), a leading AI conference that was held virtually. According to a report by MIT Technology Review, most of these new tools to dupe facial recognition software make tiny changes to an image that are not visible to the human eye but can confuse an AI, forcing the software to make a mistake in clearly identifying the person or the object in the image, or, even stopping it from realising the image is a selfie.
Emily Wenger, from the University of Chicago, has developed one of these ‘image cloaking’ tools, called Fawkes, with her colleagues. The other, called LowKey, is developed by Valeriia Cherepanova and her colleagues at the University of Maryland.
Fawkes adds pixel-level disturbances to the images that stop facial recognition systems from identifying the persons in them but it leaves the image unchanged to humans. In an experiment with a small data set of 50 images, Fawkes was found to be 100 percent effective against commercial facial recognition systems. Fawkes can be downloaded for Windows and Mac, and its method was detailed in a paper titled ‘Protecting Personal Privacy Against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models’.
However, the authors note Fawkes can’t mislead existing systems that have already trained on your unprotected images. LowKey, which expands on Wenger’s system by minutely altering images to an extent that they can fool pretrained commercial AI models, preventing it from recognising the person in the image. LowKey, detailed in a paper titled ‘Leveraging Adversarial Attacks to Protect Social Media Users From Facial Recognition’, is available for use online.
Yet another method, detailed in a paper titled ‘Unlearnable Examples: Making Personal Data Unexploitable’ by Daniel Ma and other researchers at the Deakin University in Australia, takes such ‘data poisoning’ one step further, introducing changes to images that force an AI model to discard it during training, preventing evaluation post training.
Wenger notes that Fawkes was briefly unable to trick Microsoft Azure, saying, “It suddenly somehow became robust to cloaked images that we had generated… We don’t know what happened.” She said it was now a race against the AI, with Fawkes later updated to be able to spoof Azure again. “This is another cat-and-mouse arms race,” she added.
The report also quoted Wenger saying that while regulation against such AI tools will help maintain privacy, there will always be a “disconnect” between what is legally acceptable and what people want, and that spoofing methods like Fawkes can help “fill that gap”. She says her motivation to develop this tool was simple: to give people “some power” that they didn’t already have.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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