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Microsoft's AI Judges Age From Snapshots, With Mixed Results
mikejuk writes: A Microsoft Research project that lets users upload photos and estimates their age and gender has attracted more attention than expected — not all of it complimentary. The How-Old.net site demonstrates of some of the capabilities of the Face API included in Microsoft's Project Oxford that was announced at Build. It may have been expected to be a source of amusement but instead it backfired when people started to upload their own photos and discovered just how wrong its estimates could be. It demonstrates not only that machine learning has a long way to go before it's good at estimating age, but also that machine learning may not be the most politically correct way to go about answering the question 'How Old Do I look'. It might be better to employ and algorithm that built in all the rules of how to make a polite answer to that request — such as always knock a decade off the age of anyone over 28. Perhaps this particular neural network needs to learn some social skills before pronouncing how old people look. However it is capable of telling some truths — a photo of Barak Obama in 2005 gives an estimated age of 46, close to his real age of 44, but just 9 years later in 2014 the age guessing robot places him at 65. It seems that Mr President aged 20 years in less than 10 years of office.
It has been shown that presidents age quickly in office.
Political correctness is not correctness at all.
May be the SJWs should just shut up
Would you also suggest that scales knock off 20 pounds to make people feel better about themselves? If people are self-conscious about how old they look, perhaps it's best they shouldn't use a website that might hurt their feelings.
The only guy I've ever met who could judge the age of people well was a man who made some money on the Stroget in Copenhagen more than ten years ago by betting with pedestrians that he could guess their age (he probably did it mostly for fun, though). But he didn't use the face only, he used all kinds of clues, especially he looked at people's necks. He was really good, but everyone else just sucks at it.
No wonder A.I. can't do it when ordinary people can't do it either.
If people can't tell your age when looking at you, how can you get a computer to do it accurately?
A persons apparent age is going to depend on a whole bunch of things including environmental things. EG take a farmer who spends all of his time outdoors and someone who partakes in a regime of moisturizers, skin peeling and other assorted beauty activities and lives in their mom's basement. Even if they are the same biological age, they won't look the same apparent age.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I ran some wedding pictures through the site. By the end of the evening, the bride and groom were 15 years younger! It was a good wedding.
Isn't this a publicity gimmick? People age physically at different degree's for different reasons. Such as people raised in the desert or dry warm may have more wrinkles. Its really reinforces a perception that looks is everything and the older or younger you look in regards to your actually age means something. I guess maybe it does prove a point that although we say looks is not everything. It probably is.
Then suggested I update my Hotmail account to Windows Live to be compatible with Windows ME.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I ran some photos through. It detected the girl standing next to me (the ex) and made her out to be older than she was or looked (she was 22, but she registered as 26). It didn't detect my face at all. Seriously, it just skipped over me completely.
I guess I'm just invisible to the world. Fuck.
C'mon, it's a fun tech project, and people should stop whining about it.
What's not funny is where we are going with this kind of technology. Always on facial recognition and people tracking is already happening some places in the world. Casinos and airports were probably the leaders in the field, but soon it will be everywhere. I despise the thought of a government database tracking people everywhere, not to mention law enforcement reliance on face recognition that (as evidenced here) may be less than perfect. "The computer says you did it, so you're guilty."
http://imgur.com/gallery/Q1t0T...
Silence is a state of mime.
Humans can't even reliably tell age face to face, 'hell makes them think they can do it with a computer on, most of the time, grainy images with poor lighting, AKA, pretty much every picture of people ever? (outside of modelling pictures or people with actual cameras and not shit phone cameras)
I've seen it give different results on the same person just shifted a few pixels down, thanks to JPG compression. (easy, take a picture of a tweet feed or something)
That is better than what most phones will put out, the noisy mess of pixels most phones produce is so awful.
And even with good modelling pictures, it still can't tell the age.
I've seen adult pornstars be labelled underage. Oh god.
How-old is the best new way you can share with the NSA.
not to mention law enforcement reliance on face recognition that (as evidenced here) may be less than perfect. "The computer says you did it, so you're guilty."
As opposed to human eyewitness testimony, which has proven to be flawless.
I notice that it tends to confuse youth with femininity and tends to identify young (15) boys as being girls.
The criticism of website is unfair. Some people in some photos indeed look younger. Instead of criticizing AI algorithms, I would suggest take a test by using a random photo where you don't the true ages beforehand but have a way to find it out. Compare you guess with the website and see who does better. I tested several photos from my collection by asking my colleagues to guess the ages of my extended family members and the website. On an average the website was actually better than my colleagues.
So we take something with the same success rate, and give it a veneer of science and technology?
It pronounced me at 39. i must look old :)
It seems Square Enix did an excellent job with the Miqo'te race of Final Fantasy XIV:
http://moetoy.com/wp-content/u...
http://geeksprinkles.com/wp-co...
http://24.media.tumblr.com/849...
Anyone dare to try that AI with the other races, especially Lalafell? :p
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I tried several photos. I got as low as 23 and as high as 46 with photos from within the past 3 years (I'm in my mid-30's). In one photo I'm standing next to my mother who is in her late 60's in the photo. In that photo it says I'm 46 and she's 40. I believe the difference is that my hair is starting to go gray but my mother still colors her hair. In the picture where it says I'm 23 my hair is cut short and isn't noticeably going gray. However, I used the exact same picture and adjusted the lighting and it changed my age from 23 to 27.
Curiously, it seems to have a problem with infants. I have a 22 month nephew that depending on lighting says is either a 5 or 16 year old girl. I also tried a picture of my nephew being held by his mother at only a few months old and it guessed he was 5 years old. The algorithm is definitely using just the face as if it used other contextual clues it'd be very obvious a 5 year old is much larger than a 3 month old or that a 16 years old is much taller than a 5 year old.
Interesting concept but it appears hair color and lighting play large roles (simply based on my own manipulation of identical pictures).
In every photo of me from late 20's to current it has said I look 37 which I have just turned this year. My take on this is that I am going to be one hell of a good looking 60 year old. It also said a picture of my 8 year old daughter looked 22 when there is no way from facial features to clothing that this could have been considered a valid guess by anyone.
Before I met my GF's mom, she told me that her mom looked much younger than she was, without telling me her age (or I forgot). So when I met her, she proudly asked me how old I thought she was. As a good programmer, I compensated knowing the way the bias went, and gave her a good decade more than she actually was. She didn't appreciate. Yeah, social skills, blah, blah, blah...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Microsoft's AI Judges Age From Snapshots, With Mixed Results
The same mixed results you'd probably get with people doing it.
Just look at those two photos of Obama - he really does look older in one than the other. If you didn't know who he was, or if you found similar looking images of two distinct people, those age guesses would not seem wildly inaccurate.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
DoILookFatInThisDress.com
AmIPregantOrJustFat.com
ShouldIWearSpadex.com (well you can build that one but only if it always returns NO for all input)
HighlightLinesOnMyFace.com
UsePhotosFromThisFacebookFeedToPhotoshopSomeoneCheatingOnSO.com
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not so mixed, really - it's just the kind of junk that MS is wont to produce.
I thought this sounded like fun so I uploaded my photo to the Microsoft age-guessing app.
All it said was, "Shall we notify next of kin?"
I think it must be broken.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Looking at people's hands can also be a good datapoint for age.
Hands are also a good way to identify robots.
John ...?
Was she a
Peter
Probably.
John
That's amazing!
Peter
Supposedly, you really can't tell expect by looking at the hands.
They haven't perfected the hands yet.
Try the same photo at different scales, you get a younger result the smaller the image.
The work they have done is, rubbish, it seems to be based on a fundamentally flawed idea of what indicates age.
While a lot of people might be unhappy with the results, it appears that there are also might be those who will be quite happy with the way it underestimates their ages.
I read somewhere that not only do people age differently but different parts of the same person age differently. But just what is age, if not meausred against some arbitrary clock? Just think of Einstein's thought experiment about relativity, the astronaut twin who ages a few years vs the earh-bound twin who ages thousands of years (assuming he has someone managed to find a life-support system that makes him surive to that age).
But if we assume the mundane notion of age being something we celebrate each year or put in a person's obituary or Wikipedia page then clearly no visual system or medical diagnostic can accurately calibrate a person's calendar age. The lungs of a forty-year old smoker who never exercises may well look and feel older than the lungs of an eighty-year-old who jogs regularly and plays the saxophone in the local orchestra. So yes maybe Obama does look 70 years old, visually at least, when compared to a sample of photos of people born on this planet 70 years ago.
This is from the website's TOS, which happens to be the TOS for Azure as well:
"Microsoft does not claim ownership of any materials you provide to Microsoft (including feedback and suggestions) or post, upload, input, or submit to any Website Services for review by the general public, or by the members of any public or private community (collectively "Submissions"). However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing, or submitting your Submission, you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies, and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses (including, without limitation, all Microsoft services), including, without limitation, the license rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate, and reformat your Submission; to publish your name in connection with your Submission; and to sublicense such rights to any supplier of the Website Services."
So, how are you, future microsoft's advertisement stars?
it seems to be incredibly good at picking the right gender which I have to admit is pretty impressive.
I fed it an MS brochure, and it said the company acts 80 years old
Table-ized A.I.
As long as it can hold up to feminine scrutiny then this is good enough a benchmark for my dating purposes. I just plugged in every couple I could find and it confirms the statistics that women prefer men that appear to be a few years older than them. Looking over past photos it appears at those times I appeared older than whom I was with at the time.
...would be that stupid. :)
Captcha: realists
This is definitely not a good choice for AI if you think that AI should try to, initially, at least be good at doing things humans can do.
I know for certain that people can SUCK at being able to guess age.
But from a PR standpoint, someone was smart in figuring that this would be loads of fun socially. They didn't even have to get the AI right....they just needed to get it consistent. I swear, from the 20 or so photos I submitted, it was more like a RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR.
Interesting -- someone in the office was running everyone's picture through this page, and if you averaged their guess of my age (52) with Microsoft's guess (68. Gee, thanks ever so much, Microsoft) you get my actual age. (60)
I'm surprised there's no "Wrong, the true age is..." input, to help them correct their model.
C'mon, it's a fun tech project, and people should stop whining about it.
It's not clear you understand the potential consequences of this. Age based discrimination is a very serious problem, one that will sooner or later affect almost every human being.
One of the most effective ways to prevent this form of discrimination from happening is to block people from having access to people's ages and dates of birth. This information should be treated as private. It shouldn't be on the Internet, it shouldn't be in company databases, it shouldn't be on government issued ids (codes can be used in place of age to indicate things such as legal adult status), it shouldn't be in government records that are subject to public access until long after a person is dead, and it shouldn't even be in permanent medical records (if the doctor needs to know, let them ask).
It's already an uphill battle to get this information out of all these records, mostly because Western society for a long time has been in denial about this problem. Other cultures have different values, of course, but it is Western culture that resulted in the creation of most of the tools and standards we already have. Creating new tools that (once perfected) will potentially allow any member of the public to measure the age of others is not at all desirable.