So I was pretty pleased to see artificial intelligence guess that I’m somewhere between 19 and 29. (I’m 25).
For that, I thank How-Old.net, a site that analyzes a photo to predict age and gender using Microsoft’s new face-detection application program interface. The tool went viral on the Internet this week like MyIdol did last week or “The Dress” did before that.
Users go to the site, upload a photo and immediately get the good or bad news.
Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, information-management and machine-learning engineers at Microsoft who developed the tool, wrote Wednesday afternoon that 35,000 people had used the site around the world within a few hours of its release.
The tool seems right on for some but way off for others.
And users are beginning to investigate — well, obsess over — why they look like a teenager in some instances and a 60-year-old in others.
Face position could make a difference. Blue Sky photo editor Keri Wiginton, 33, said the tool guessed she was in her 30s when her head was turned and in her 20s when the photo was straight on.
Nick Tann, Blue Sky’s presentation editor — yes, we’ve all been obsessing — found that simply resizing photos resulted in major age differences. Check out our slideshow for his findings.
Microsoft suggested Friday that users shouldn’t take the platform too seriously.
“It’s great to see how excited people are about the project but important to note that how-old.net is a demo created for, and shown, during a Build 2015 (conference) keynote to demonstrate how easy it was for two developers to build a fun app using Microsoft cloud services,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email. “We are not sharing information on usage or access numbers. We also want to clarify, as there are some inaccurate reports, that how-old.net does not store pictures and does not store personally identifiable information (PII).”
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