Re:Tool can make photos undetectable to facial recognition w...
by admax88q on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @11:45AM
(#26957517)
There's a difference between something we can't "win" but can suppress to low levels, and something that makes no difference.
This tool makes no difference. If it's deployed in any non-trivial capacity, anybody doing nefarious facial recognition will just train their recognizer against it.
These sorts of stories pop up every few months on HN about some tool that will defeat deep learning. But invariably they are also deep learning powered tools trained against a specific recognizer. The takeaway should be about how fragile current recognizers are, and not about any one tool that's going to "defeat" facial recognition.
There's clearly value in all of those things, even though we have no clear path to (or even defensible expectation of) ever completely solving any of them. In these cases we define progress as mitigation or delay of the consequences rather than elimination of them.
Some people can imagine a technological solution to them, but that's currently science fiction — a counterfactual — and is it more counterfactual to imagine a perfect adversarial image generator than it is to imagine a perfect antibacterial agent, or a post-scarcity economy? I don't think so, personally.