Smile Vector

If you thought that the ability to algorithmically change which way people are looking in photographs was a bit disturbing, you should know that’s not even close to the limit of possibilities.

@smilevector is a bot created by Tom White that uses a neural network to add or remove smiles from photos. This kind of neural puppetry, capable of generating faces along multiple vectors, is only going to become more powerful in the future.

Images are so central to our present culture that the idea of them being this easily manipulated is a bit off-putting. Not that photographs were true to begin with: the camera always lies. The image captured is not the thing itself, and context, framing, focal length, filters, and a host of other choices can alter the message before the photons hit the film, let alone the darkroom manipulations afterwards.

In a sense, image processing like this is more honest. In this age of Photoshop, images still cling to the illusion of truth. Maybe acknowledging how much of our recorded reality is a fiction is healthier than trying to pretend that the camera has access to Truth.

After all, there are already consumer cameras and apps that detect when the subjects are smiling. And it’s not hard to combine several shots where different people are smiling to get one smiling group shot. From there, it’s just a little ways across the line to have cameras that always take pictures of people smiling, no matter what their expression actually was.

Just imagine it: 21st century family photo albums, where everyone has a perfect smile in every picture.