Name: FaceApp - CS50 Podcast, Ep. 8
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:03:55.000Z
Duration: 23 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And I'm here again, with CS50s own, Brian Yu.

DAVID MALAN: So in the news, of late, has been this app for iOS

and Android called FaceApp, as some of you might have heard.

BRIAN YU: So people keep talking about this.

But one of our teaching fellows for CS50 does have it

and was actually showing it to me earlier, today.

So the way it seems to work is that you open up the app, on your phone.

And you can choose a photo of yourself, from your photo library, a photo of you

And then you can apply any number of these different image filters

But they can do a variety of different things.

So they can show you what they think you would look like when you are older,

and show you an elderly version of yourself,

or what you looked like when you were younger.

They can do all sorts of different things to the background of the image,

And it does a pretty good job of trying to create a realistic looking photo.

And I discovered this app two years after everyone else did, it seems.

Because someone sent me a modified photo of myself

recently, whereby I was aged in the photo.

The realism of the skin, I thought was compelling.

And what was most striking to me, so much so,

that I forwarded it to a couple of relatives afterward,

is that I look like a couple of my older relatives do in reality.

And it was fascinating to see that the app was seeing these familial traits

in myself, that even I don't see when I look in the mirror, right now.

But apparently, if you age me and you make my skin

a different texture, over time, oh my god,

I'm going to actually look like some of my relatives, it seems.

A human trying to do this type of thing on their own,

And I think that really just speaks to how powerful machine learning has

That these machines have been trained to look at these huge data

sets of analyzing younger and older pictures

probably, and trying to understand, fundamentally, how you translate

And now, they've just gotten really good at being able to do that in a way

that humans, on their own, never would've been able to.

DAVID MALAN: So this, is then, related to our recent chat

Where, I assume, the training data in this case

is just lots, and lots, and lots of photos of people, young and old,

So FaceApp doesn't publicly announce exactly how their algorithm is working.

But I would imagine that it's probably just a lot of training data,

where you give the algorithm a whole bunch of younger photos and older

And you try and train the algorithm to be

able to figure out how to turn the younger photo into the older photo.

Such that you can give it a new younger photo as input and have it

predict what the older photo is going to look like.

It's really quite fascinating too, to allow

people to imagine what they might look like in different clothes,

or I suppose, with different makeup on, or so forth.

But it's actually quite scary too, because a corollary

of being able to mutate people's faces in this way, digitally,

is that you can surely identify people, as well.

And I think that's one of the topics that's been getting a lot of attention

here, certainly in the US, whereby a few cities, most recently, have actually

outlawed, outright, the police's use of facial recognition

Somerville, Massachusetts, which is right around the corner from Cambridge,

And I mean, that's actually the flip side of the cool factor.

I mean, honestly, I was pretty caught up in it,

when I received this photo of myself some 20, 30, 40 years down the road.

Sent it along happily to some other people.

And then didn't really stop to think, until a few days later,

when I started reading about FaceApp and the implications thereof.

That actually, this really does forebode a scary future,

where all too easily can computers, and whatever humans own them,

pick us out in the crowd or track, really

I mean, do you think that policy is really the only solution to this?

BRIAN YU: So I think that certainly, technology

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FaceApp - CS50 Podcast, Ep. 8

apparently

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