Fawkes

The AI era is upon us, for better or worse. Machine learning algorithms of all manners are being integrated into increasingly more products and services, and as artificial intelligence must be trained on something to start functioning, privacy concerns are indeed very real.

Facial recognition can be an especially active offender in this case, as it is only natural for some people to feel uncomfortable having AI models include their faces in their training. Fawkes is a program that seeks to circumvent this in a clever way: it effectively “cloaks” the user’s face in a subtle, but meaningful way to deter AI facial recognition algorithms.

There’s very much a balance that must be struck between fending off facial recognition algorithms, while also preserving details about the user’s face. While it’s easy to blur faces to get things over with, it’s more than a way off from ideal.

As such, the program employs an algorithm that automatically recognizes the user’s face and alters it in such a way as to deter machine learning models from sampling your identity.

The way it handles this is really quite smart: the program seeks to “poison” those models’ perception of your face, per the developer’s sayings, by simply modifying some facial features in ways that impede them. To test it out, feed an image to the program, click Run Protection, and wait for about a minute: the new photo will be saved in the same directory as the source, so feel free to take a look and compare them.

If you want to get serious about zooming in and comparing the photos, you’ll notice a few very small changes to your face: the structure and complexion are kept intact, however. The changes made by Fawkes can simply be chalked as a camera quirk of sorts, which do not affect your look in any way.

As it stands, if you’re after more protection from AI, Fawkes can be a worthwhile solution. The alterations it makes are very slight and can hardly be noticed even when very closely comparing the modified copy to the original.