Hi!
A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That’s why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.
So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn’t be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j
Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don’t want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.
TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It’s ok if there’s only a framework (as long as it’s not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).
What about just not taking pictures or video of faces?
If you want to do some PR that appeals to people that aren’t already on the left, then it’s sometimes unavoidable.
I remember not being on the left. I didn’t need to see faces to feel ways about stuff.
Especially if both sides are fucking masked!
I’m not talking about the current situation in the US. I’m talking about e.g. protest in Europe which aren’t necessarily as heated up as the protests in LA right now. That might have not come across, sorry.
It’s just more friendly to non-radicalised folks if the sharepic of the local union don’t show up in balaclavas.
Still, i remember before i was quite so radical, and i don’t think that would have been true for me?
That’s good for you, butedoesn’t apply to everyone.
Okay, but if we’re speaking for people who are presumably neither of us, then that’s my best tool.
What did you think, when you first saw masked protestors?
I’m not really interested in this kind of discussion. I was asking for a tool, not for a discussion of wether or not to use that tool.
FYI: In our instance, can reply with ‘disengage’ to end a discussion without conceding it.
But if you’re saying it’s effective, was it effective on you? What was your experience when you were the target audience you’re talking about?