Your Face Tomorrow

In which Michael W. Clune writes about getting his picture taken. Just kidding; Clune, a contributing editor for Harper’s, skips from a sassy exchange over a smile-free passport photo to Case Western University’s Visual Understanding Lab, where he undergoes a “faceprint,” the details of his face translated into code for use by facial recognition software. This is no mere screed against the perils of AI-powered surveillance technology, though those concerns are present. Rather, Clune takes up “the question of facial control,” looking to technological advances to clarify his understanding of how we use our faces—and how they are used by others.

When I put my glasses back on, I looked into the reflective glass of the camera. It looked like the black, expressionless eye of an insect. What does an ant see when it looks at your face? I didn’t know. I thought about ants because a bug’s perspective seemed like the most alien thing I could imagine.

I didn’t understand then that the machine behind the eye of that camera is much more alien than an ant. Scientists know a lot of things about insect optical processing. But no one knows what artificial intelligence sees when it looks at a picture of your face.

The large language models that programmers train to identify faces are black boxes. Even the engineers don’t know how or in what form your face appears to the system. All they know is that AI likes your face to be brightly lit. And that it prefers for you not to smile.