If you want to see an example of artificial intelligence at work, FaceApp is a good place to start. It uses AI to transform faces and show you different versions of yourself. What would you look like if you were older or a different sex? What if you smiled more?
When the app launched in January, I heard the usual worries about it creating a generation of narcissists. Yet humans have always loved self-portraits; front-facing cameras have simply made creating them much easier. And now AI makes manipulating them easy, too.
FaceApp uses neural networks, programs that allow it to “learn” based on certain data; in this case thousands of existing images. No one told it how to make a face look more male; it worked it out for itself by looking at photos of men and identifying common features.
“Sometimes there are unexpected side-effects,” the app’s creator, St Petersburg-based Yaroslav Goncharov, told me. “The ‘young’ filter can add some pimples or even mouth braces.”
There are downsides to working with an AI when its inner workings are not fully grasped. In an early version of the app, the “hot” filter lightened skin tone, suggesting the AI had picked up the idea that pale is beautiful. (FaceApp apologised and renamed the filter “spark” to remove the cultural baggage.) There will also be questions about how worried we should be — in the age of “fake news” — about the increasing sophistication of image and video-manipulation software.
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Yet what intrigued me about FaceApp was how it made me feel. Male me looked so convincing that I wondered how my life would have turned out as Harry Lewis. (Men would feel less need to explain things to me on the internet.) Old me felt like reaching across time to the woman I will become.
According to Goncharov, that’s a common reaction. “The main reason it is so fascinating is that it looks like magic,” he said. “It is so photorealistic, it tricks our brains to believe in imaginary things.”
This realism also explains why people find the “old” filter so disquieting: “Many people say it turns them into their parents.”
Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman
@helenlewis
Don’t panic: your problems solved
In this uncertain world, I refuse to enter my credit card details to buy apps for my iPad. Am I right?
CC, southwest London
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Apple follows “industry best practice”: credit card numbers are encrypted and kept separately from owners’ other details, such as name and billing address. None of this information is stored on your device but on secure servers. However, you don’t have to give any of those details to Apple (or Google, if using Android). All you need to set up an app store account is an email address; you can buy credit via gift cards available on the high street. Enter the code on the card and your account is topped up — no plastic required. Matt Bingham
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Apps to change your life: Bone up on the Bard
Shakespeare Pro
Free, Android; £9.99, Apple
Keep the complete works in your pocket: all the plays, sonnets and more, plus some basic notes. The Apple version also offers definitions of 21,000 tricky words.
National Theatre Shakespeare
Free, Apple
See the posters, casts and production notes of 55 stagings of the Bard’s plays at London’s National since 1963. Full of tips for budding directors.
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Heuristic Shakespeare: The Tempest
£5.99, Apple
The first of a series of interactive versions of all the plays. Sir Ian McKellen heads the pros reading the text; publisher Arden supplies notes.
Matt Bingham