An Italian brand has just unveiled its range of clothing with amazing skills. The latter manage to thwart the vigilance of facial recognition systems. Through patterns, the AI is misled and fails to find matches.
Artificial intelligence has flaws. Two Marines managed to fool a military AI by moving under a cardboard box. Clothing can also do the job. An Italian brand seeks to capitalize on the fears of citizens, frightened by the trivialization of facial recognition systems. Which are already deployed in repressive regimes to arrest dissidents and lawbreakers.
The Capable brand has come up with a creative solution that can bypass the AI even if your face is exposed. In the Manifesto collection, the clothes are colorful with strange and flamboyant patterns. These incorporate details that transform you into a zebra, a dog or a giraffe in the eyes of facial recognition systems. Not perceiving a human form, these will fail to analyze you to find a correspondence with your face.
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A range of clothing capable of fooling the AI
Co-founder Rachele Didero successfully tested the designs using YOLO (You Only Look Once). It is a neural network-based object detection system capable of recognizing faces when trained using a database of photos. If the project shines with its ingenuity, we can already point out certain limits.
On the one hand, a government could very well select images of Capable’s clothing to classify them as “human” in its facial recognition system. From then on, their protective capacity would disappear in a flash. On the other hand, the price of 420 euros for a sweater necessarily distances ordinary mortals, reserving this type of advanced technology for the most affluent dissidents.
We imagine, however, that this range aims above all to demonstrate that technology can be put at the service of the citizen. And that we are not doomed to be tracked by AI systems. An easier (and cheaper) solution is also to wear a mask. But the latter is not infallible: even the iPhone can recognize you if you are masked based on your eyes.
