App to play roulette with your own face

FACEAPP is an app for ruining your face. It morphs you into an old person. It can change your appearance to make you look more masculine or feminine, maybe. Take a photo with a neutral expression, and it will force you to smile. It is an app built to please those who have wanted a new way to play roulette with their own face.

The app uses neural networks to try to keep the results photo-realistic, FaceApp founder and chief executive Yaroslav Goncharov told TechCrunch in February.

The app has been around for a few months, yet became suddenly popular in the US over the past few weeks.

Maybe it’s something to do with the unpredictability of FaceApp’s transformations.

Anyway, people are having a lot of fun online with FaceApp this week. But just as FaceApp exists to “transform” your face into something worse, I would like to “transform” your temptation to use this app into a lack thereof. It had a racist “hot” filter. One of the transformation options for FaceApp used to be to make you look hotter. One of the things it actually did: The app lightened skin.

On Tuesday, FaceApp apologised and said it had temporarily renamed the filter to “spark”. As of Wednesday, the option no longer appears on Android’s version of the app.

“We are deeply sorry,” Goncharov told the Guardian. “It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour.”

The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the data set it used to train the “hotness” filter was specific to FaceApp, which clearly didn’t use a diverse enough data set to define “beauty”. – Washington Post