Complex Numbers

AI See What You Did There

Lots of stuff about AI floating around. Cars, art, writing, etc.

It's not always a bad thing.

     Artist Uses AI Surveillance Cameras to Identify Influencers Posing for Instagram  
Dries Depoorter's "The Follower" project combines AI, open access cameras, and influencers to show behind the scenes of viral shots—without them knowing.

This article, from Vice, is fairly short, and I found it interesting, partly because of my photography background.

Dries Depoorter, the Belgium-based public speaker and artist behind the Die With Me chat app experiment, launched his latest project, The Follower, combining open access cameras and Instagram influencers.

On the other hand, I'm not a fan of precious artists.

Depoorter recorded weeks of footage from open access cameras, which observe public spaces, and which frequently have livestreams available online for anyone to access, that were trained on famous landmarks, including the Temple Bar in Dublin, Times Square, and the big sign at the entrance of Wrigley Field.

This part's important, because it emphasizes just how public this project is. It's not like he had to pull back much of a curtain.

The side-by-side comparisons between the casual-seeming photos the Instagram influencers chose to upload, and the footage of them laboring over the perfect way to hold a coffee, sling a jacket over their shoulder or kiss their date reveal how much work goes into a single photo for them—and how inauthentic the entire process really is behind the scenes.

As much as I loathe the entire concept of influenzas, and superficiality in general, I mean, that's a big part of what professional photography is: a lot of work. Sure, I spent a lot of time getting candid shots at parties, the kind of thing that anyone with a dumbphone can do now, but those are easy. Getting the right ligthing, the right pose, the right composition... that's work, and that's why professional photography is still a thing.

“If you check out all my work you can see I show the dangers of new technology,” Depoorter said.

I think the dangers are overreported. How about a project that exposes just how helpful some of this stuff is?

“I hope to reach a lot of people of making it really simple. I really don’t like difficult art. I like to keep it really simple. I think I’m part of a new generation of artists that work with technology.”

Everyone's hypocritical about something, but this juxtaposition—all within one paragraph of the original article—nearly broke my brain.

Capturing people in this way, unsuspecting yet fully public, feels like witnessing something intimate but also shameless.

Yeah, not really. To me, it feels like exposing the wires in a puppet show, or getting a tour of a clock tower, or watching one of those documentaries on the making of a Hollywood blockbuster: you see how the magic is done. That's not always a bad thing, either; once people know it's not effortless, perhaps they're less likely to feel inadequate by comparison.

It's like... you see your favorite celebrity, all slim and attractive, so maybe you feel like you got the short end of the beauty stick or something. But then you realize the amount of work that goes into that, and, okay, maybe it's not so natural after all. There still might be some feelings of inadequacy—in my case, I can't fathom doing that much work for anything—but at least you know there's more to it than just winning a genetic lottery.

It’s also a reminder that everywhere we go in the modern world, we’re being watched, even when we think we can curate and control what the world sees of us.

Isn't that what Elf on the Shelf is supposed to train your kids for?