'Most disturbing website on Internet' can find every single picture that exists of you
Wherever you look in the world of technology, artificial intelligence is being developed - and sometimes with quite scary results.
Chatbots are saying they want access to nuclear codes and attempting to convince people talking with them to break up with their partners by claiming they don't really love each other.
A guy managed to generate an AI copy of his own voice and showed how it could be used to break into his bank account with only the most basic of personal details.
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Then, of course, there's the worry over what sort of jobs AI are going to steal from people, and in our pursuit of whether or not we can do something it always helps to pause and consider whether we actually should.
Basically, we all need to be a bit more like Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park.
With that in mind, an image search site which uses AI has been slammed as 'the most disturbing AI website on the internet', and it's a place called PimEyes.
The basic premise is that you give the site a photo of yourself and it searches the internet to identify any other pictures of you that are online, so you can in theory see all the places on the internet where there are images of you.
Some think it could be a great tool for controlling the use of your own image on the internet, while others have said it would be 'a stalker's dream'.
Going off the results of a quick test of the site performed by yours truly it's perhaps better at finding your doppelgangers than it is at tracking down every picture of you on the internet, but it is incredibly fast.
Using their free service and a picture of myself hastily taken with the webcam of my work computer, the site coughed up eight images.
The first two were pictures of me, though the remaining six were images of other people who shared some similar facial features, mostly the eyebrows and the beard.
PimEyes and their AI had managed to find these two pictures of me within three seconds of having a look at my face, and this was on the free version which didn't tell me where the pictures had come from.
For a fee the website could do a much more in-depth search and also provide links to every single place the pictures appeared, which some people welcomed as a useful tool.
One person said the site was 'disturbing but also extremely valuable' and praised it for 'finding who has used my face without my consent' so they could order websites to take down the pictures.
Others agreed that this would actually be a welcome and useful way of using the site, while someone else said they uploaded a picture of themselves as a nine-year-old and had the site accurately identifying images of themselves as an adult.
They suggested it could be very useful with 'missing children reports', but people found that this technology also worked the other way around too.
Another said she uploaded a recent picture of herself and PimEyes recognised a picture of her on the internet of when she was 10-years-old.
PimEyes does allow people to opt-out of appearing in people's searches, but they want a scan of your ID or passport to verify that it's you doing this.
Topics: Technology
Joe Harker