Diving into the future

Simply called ‘Old’, this FaceApp filter that turns your smartphone into a crystal ball has become all the rage among celebrities and pretty much everyone else.

It is so uncanny, people might as well have walked through a time machine and got themselves a rough deal. We are talking about the AI-backed photo-editing smartphone app, FaceApp, which has recently achieved unprecedented social media virality because of how accurately its ‘Old’ filter manages to convert present-day portraits of people into their old-age versions. Even though the results may not have much basis in reality, the sophistication with which the AI produces results has left people surprised, if not impressed.

This online trend originates a few months after Snapchat’s baby-face and gender swap filters, which also work quite intelligently, became popular. FaceApp, however, is different in the sense that the two-year-old app, which is not a cultural phenomenon like Snapchat, has almost entirely been benefitted by virality. Once earlier too — though not as prominently as this time — the app came into the limelight when it went viral. While apps are anyway known to bank upon internet trends, FaceApp’s entry into daily social-media parlance is reflective of how a unique, in-your-face, feature is good enough to bring something to the fore. This is also evident in how it isn’t any of the many other features, but the old-age filter, that has drawn people to FaceApp.

And, now, everyone is using it. Celebrities such as Gordon Ramsey, Nick Jonas, Varun Dhawan and Arjun Kapoor have uploaded their 'old versions' to either Twitter or Instagram, to much fanfare, while fans have done the deed for other prominent personalities. The hashtag, #FaceApp Challenge, has been trending and just that one keyword in social-media search bars ends up with fascinating, sometimes rib-tickling, results.

What lies at the core of Snapchat, Bitmoji and FaceApp is the effective use of augmented reality (a technology where real-life scenes are augmented with a computer-generated character/element) and artificial intelligence. How it works can be understood through FaceApp AI, created along with the app by a team of Russian developers, which banks upon ‘deep learning’ technology. This is a computer system that imitates the human brain across multiple levels to generate the most accurate result — in simpler terms, the app is extraordinarily intuitive. Obviously, all this happens in the background while what you see on the UI is an option to select or click a picture using your phone’s camera, choose a filter, and presto!

While the FaceApp fad might subside soon, its present popularity has led many to raise privacy and security concerns. Some users have pointed out that it is possible for the app to access the iPhone’s photo library without the user enabling 'Photos' access. While this doesn’t mean a privacy breach, it definitely sets the wrong precedent: can FaceApp use this to its advantage sometime in the future?

Many such claims, however, have been debunked and a lot of it is public paranoia. Presently, everyone seems to be having a tonne of fun with the app. Who knows, maybe 60 years later, someone will find one of these photographs, look into the mirror, and wonder — “things haven’t panned out much differently, isn’t it?”