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Microsoft Brings AI-Powered Background Blurring To Skype (betanews.com)
A few months after adding background blurring to its Teams tool, Microsoft has brought the same option to Skype on the desktop. From a report: The feature serves two purposes. Firstly it helps to focus attention on the person that is speaking, but secondly -- and perhaps more importantly -- it hides any untidiness (or secrets) that may be going on behind the speaker. It's another push from Microsoft to move people away from Skype Classic to Skype 8. Background blurring makes use of artificial intelligence to pick out the subject of a video, having been trained to detect hair, hands and arms.
But what about bald quadruple amputees like myself.
Microsoft has another algorithm so the background blurring could be restored?
I'm guessing there are plenty of governments and government agencies that would like to see more details...
"Background blurring makes use of artificial intelligence to pick out the subject of a video, having been trained to detect hair, hands and arms" of white people only?
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/02/11/1055241/facial-recognition-is-accurate-if-youre-a-white-guy
I only look at boobs, so this face, hair and arms thing is useless
You know what is going to be cool in five years time? Bokeh free photos. You'll be amazed by them! Using advanced AI processing and machine learning, your phone will be able to expand the depth of field of the camera to remove that annoying blurring that occurs around objects further away. Now everything in your photos will be crisp, clear and in perfect focus - just the way they appear in real life. 2 years later when Apple releases the technology, they will term it Liquid Definition Retina Photos. It is going to be amazing.
This is already common tech in lots of smartphone cameras. When you use portrait mode, it is doing several things and one of them is often the simulation of the bokeh effect you get from good lenses. They are basically artificially blurring the background to simulate the effect and I imagine this is just a video application of the same basic concept. The lenses in most smartphone cameras are too small to have the depth of field necessary to blur backgrounds very effectively optically. It isn't that they are bad lenses, just that the laws of physics prevent them from doing this particular trick very well.
Of course they have to pretend AI is somehow involved so they can punch their buzzword bingo card.
Well, microsoft managed to move me and everybody I know away from skype classic by making it so bad it doesn't make any sense to use it for calls anymore. Everybody just uses whatsapp or something for video calls now. Mission accomplished?
Things like this are notoriously bad at picking out black people. Hopefully they've learned from past mistakes and they've trained the AI to be better.
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Every startup using skype with sales-forecasts on the "blurred" whiteboard showing aggressive growth may find it much easier to get funding.
And M12 may start making supernaturally good investments.
And they don't even need the details -- just a blurring AI that also returns a single bit: "yup, invest in this one", or "yipes, stay away".
If they an teach AI to identify ugly people and blur their faces, we can talk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So....focus then?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Eventually Microsoft will have collected enough image and sound analysis data of you, that their overlords can collect it and literally put your face and voice to any spoken words and claim it's real. It may not sound concerning to you, but there are always people in higher up and more important places that could be targets for these things.
If you think the whole "deep fake" thing is not of interest to the U.S. government, then you probably think CIA is as harmless as a toy factory.
I posted to reddit about it- its been removed from control panel - taskman under startups and even app store. (The skype setting to take Skype off start up has been removed as well.)
The only options I have found is some shell code I haven't had time to look at....
Not sure if I am part of a limited "Test" or a larger action.
- Give MS millions of hours of video + audio + chat transcripts
- Apply ML / AI
- MS can now correlate facial expressions, voice stress, computer recognized speech with intention
- MS can now correlate video with attention paid to the screen/job
Sell to employers to monitor:
- First round: Airline pilots monitored via camera, facial recognition, etc for sleepyness / slack behavior
- Second round: Offshore call centers monitoring workers for attention to the job
- Third round: Everyday office workers monitored for attention to the job
- Fourth round: Large scale scoring of people based on facial expression recogniton, voice analysis, speech analysis, etc.
Think the old number of keystrokes monitoring done for 1980s data entry workers and then apply that same coarse measurement to just about every office worker.
Large banks do extensive monitoring and correlation of tellers from job application tests to how they perform in the job and by tens of thousands of trials, now have geared employment screening tests to weed out what the bank calls less productive workers.
Sounds odd but you will see a job interview process as being a psychological test done via video first, then successive rounds of more tests, followed by three or four layers of screening by computer algorithms and long later an interview with a human.
.. Is that a bong behind you, I can just barely make it out.
Lots of companies try and do interviews on Skype to make sure the person they talk to remotely is the person who turns up. Especially in the contract workforce there is not always a in person interview. And there are many unscrupulous contracting bodyshoppers who have someone else take the interview. If Microsoft can provide a Skype Professional version which can do real time deepfakes on Skype than they can sell many licenses.
**Life is too short to be serious**
And you wondered where the future tech for invisibility to cameras comes from. Adversarial markings for AI image compression or blurring.
Quick patent it.
But thanks Google Chrome team for giving an insight into your roadmap ;)
Pretty soon anything that runs on a computer or smartphone is going to be called artificial intelligence.
Oh, please please please give us a button we can click so that hair, hands, and arms is all that you see ... that would be awesome.
Just this floating mullet and arms.
kthanksbye
Gradients are hardwork for video codecs, and look shit unless the bitrate of the stream is high enough. Thanks Microsoft.
That's great and all... but in my experience, effectively nobody uses Skype.
I have a Skype contact list of ~250 people, and in most weeks the number of other people I see signed in and actually active is zero.
My belief is that this started when Microsoft made the decision at some point to obscure the 'online' status, such that even people who haven't signed in to their account in months or years appear "online but away". If everyone consistently thinks their friends are online but have just stepped away -- when in fact the messages are never going to reach them -- the service becomes devalued. This self-perpetuates for a while, until you get where we are today -- nobody uses it.
Everyone I know has dropped using skype and gone to whats app or zoom.
Microsoft may be great at locking people stockholm style into legacy products like office but they are making very little headway into mobile, web, and social media. Karma!
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Why would anyone rely on an algorithm to hide their secrets?
it's been a long time since I stopped using skype, I always found that the quality of the calls was mediocre ____________________________________________________ https://www.icloudcentral.com/ https://tweakbox.mobi/ https://getappvalley.com/