Clever AI Safeguards Faces from Facial Recognition

Ever wondered if your online photos could be scanned by facial recognition tech? Well, researchers have come up with a smart AI tool called "Chameleon" that acts like a digital mask! This unique AI model doesn't alter the quality of your photos but makes it hard for recognition systems to spot you. The team behind Chameleon, from Georgia Tech University, shared their creation in the arXiv database. They explained how Chameleon creates a personalized mask using just a few photos of you. This mask is then applied to your photos, making you look like someone else to facial recognition tools. One of the cool things about Chameleon is that it only needs to generate one mask per user. This makes it easier and faster to use, unlike other tools that create a new mask for each photo. The researchers also mentioned how they used a special technique to keep the photos looking good. The plan is to make the Chameleon AI code available to everyone on GitHub soon. This means developers can add Chameleon to all sorts of apps, giving more people the chance to protect their privacy. Professor Ling Liu, who led the research, said this AI model could help make data sharing and AI tech safer and more responsible. PhD student Tiansheng Huang also shared that they hope to use Chameleon to protect photos from being used to train AI models without consent. Last month, another group of researchers made an AI system called "Face Anonymization Made Simple" that does something similar.