You may have noticed an uptick in weird forced smiles on celebrities and gorgeous gender-swapped selfies of your friends over the past couple days. This is not the result of an enforced “happiness” mandate or a wave of progressive attitudes toward gender roles in America; it is the product of a viral app, because everything is the product of a viral app. Here’s the standard-issue deal:
FaceApp uploads an image of your face to a neural net, which uses vast quantities of data about what “old” or “young” people or “women” or “men” look like to then add some wrinkles and add or remove facial hair. It’s convincing stuff, matching the general tone and picture quality of the original image and eerily extrapolating hair growth in particular. It’s not perfect: Their “hot” filter, in particular, has a bad habit of lightening the skin tone of the target face, which is not an ideal programmatic definition of “hot,” to put it mildly.