A few sentences in, I was thinking that the article felt AI-generated, so I scrolled to the bottom of the page. There's no author listed, but there is this disclaimer:
"AI assists in refining our editorial process, ensuring that every article is engaging, clear and succinct."
One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt. If your goal is to be succinct, you can't get much more succinct than that.
sarreph · 1h ago
The (presumably fully human) author is listed in the byline at the top of the article.
What is sadly rather ironic is the author's first name, "Al" looks like AI when stylised in the article's font.
hooskerdu · 27m ago
Could be a clever nom de plume?
anigbrowl · 18m ago
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 'Al' is not an uncommon name.
autoexec · 13m ago
> One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt.
Would it matter if the same prompt gives different output? You couldn't verify it.
Waterluvian · 36m ago
> view the original prompt
I think this assumes a very limited scope of how AI gets used for these. As if the article is a one and done output from a single prompt. I can imagine many iterative prompts combined with some copying and pasting to get an hour’s worth of copy in five minutes.
jonplackett · 56m ago
That jovial overly friendly tone is a give away. Like to thinks its writing style is HILARIOUSLY clever
or move the disclaimer to the top. or better yet, have aggregators like HN add a badge if it's likely AI generated
jedberg · 56m ago
> or better yet, have aggregators like HN add a badge if it's likely AI generated
How could you possibly tell? I've been playing around with AI detectors, putting in known all-human samples, known all-AI samples, and mixed samples.
The only thing it's gotten right is not marking a human sample as 100% AI (but it marked one of the AI samples as 100% human).
Having such a mark would be a witch-hunt for sure.
jkingsman · 1h ago
Feels like this title could benefit from clarification that 'Massive Attack' refers to the band and not the concept of a large scale attack; perhaps "Band 'Massive Attack' Turns Concert into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment"
IOUnix · 1h ago
Hahah, great point. As a music nut I knew what it was talking about, but to people who don't it might seem alarming.
antonymoose · 1h ago
I unironically thought this was going to be about a recent terrorist attack on a concert.
ricardonunez · 1h ago
“Turns concert” clarified it to me.
bruffen · 1h ago
My next stop was going to be LiveLeak to see the aftermath.
pineaux · 9m ago
Liveleak is no more my good old friend
thw_9a83c · 1h ago
> The band deployed live facial recognition technology that captured and analyzed attendees during their recent performance.
I think more drama has been created around this than is necessary. Based on the video, the real-time projected visitor's faces were not analyzed. They were simply shown with a random description flag attached, such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher." It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
jkestner · 1h ago
The fact that people were uncomfortable with simply having their pictures taken and shown without their knowledge gives lie to the idea that "You're in a public place—of course you have no right to privacy." It's great to be given the chance to face your principles.
insickness · 8m ago
Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be. However, that doesn't mean your likeness can be used for just any purpose.
stevage · 1h ago
Oh so it isn't even recognition, in that it doesn't identify the people. Just face detection.
embedded_hiker · 24m ago
Saturday Night Live used to do this with their studio audience in the 1970s.The captions were silly but could have been considered insulting sometimes.
bongodongobob · 16m ago
Drama? They were making a point. And it seems like it was taken. "If this outrages you, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg compared to what governments are doing."
autoexec · 29m ago
> It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar", "twice divorced", "low quality hire", "easy to scam", "both parents dead", "rude to staff", "convicted felon", "not sexually active", "takes Metformin", "spends > $60 on alcohol a month", "dishonest", etc.
None of the people who actually take advantage of you or manipulate you using surveillance capitalism cares if you're a "cloud watcher" or "inspiring"
0xbadcafebee · 41m ago
I tried to create an art piece sorta like this once. Video cameras in two separate places in the world, hooked up to a monitor. Made to look like a mirror, only you realize you're looking into a completely different place. So if you and someone else walk up to it, it's like you in another dimension. I was told I couldn't bring it to a regional burning man event because "it violates consent" (because they didn't consent to being filmed). Despite their being no storage or recording whatsoever and it only being a live feed to another identical event. The organizers just couldn't come to grips with the discomfort they felt that there are cameras capturing your image. We definitely need more of these projects so people don't keep their heads in the sand.
tonyarkles · 3m ago
That’s really unfortunate. Having been to a regional burn before, the fact that there was no storage or recording, to me, seems to really fit the ethos: this video feed is completely ephemeral; after a frame has been displayed it has been lost forever.
I do, however, also appreciate how strict the community seems to be about recording without consent. Some people go to burns to be able to completely disconnect from their usual lives without fear that there will be any reprisal for legal/maybe-illegal-but-harmless activities they might do there, and the potential of being recorded can put a serious damper on that feeling of freedom.
POiNTx · 24m ago
That's a really cool concept, I'd love to see more art like this that uses modern technology. Do you have a demo available somewhere to see what the effect would look like? This is one of those things where you should just do it without asking for permission. The portals[0] art installation in some cities doesn't ask for consent either.
They have long been sounding the alarm to society through their art.
As a longtime fan, I’m glad to see them being recognized in this way once again.
tptacek · 1h ago
Neat and all, but I'd be even happier if they flirted with the experiment of actually touring a new album, rather than serving as trip-hop's answer to Roger Waters, touring forever on the same 12 songs.
bigiain · 1h ago
While I agree, in that I'd love a new album.
God damn those are 12 great songs!
tptacek · 1h ago
I'd say the same thing but I saw them on the Mezzanine nostalgia tour in Chicago, which was very expensive, and it was... not one of the best shows I've seen. I'd seen them a couple times prior and they were fine (I was both times surprised by the guest vocalists they'd managed to drag along on those tours). The Mezzanine tour though was like Spinal Tap's appearance on the Simpsons; "there will be no encore!".
wisemang · 1h ago
I thoroughly enjoyed their Toronto show on that tour. To be fair it was the first time I’d seen them in concert so I didn’t have any points of comparison.
I also hadn’t really clued in to just how political they were until seeing their visuals, which I also thought added a lot. Surely not everyone’s cup of tea though.
Loughla · 1h ago
You watch your dirty mouth. They're amazing and you know it.
But yes. They do need new material dammit.
jsbisviewtiful · 1h ago
Massive Attack has 7 albums, so what are you talking about?
tptacek · 1h ago
It's been 15 years since their last original LP and over 20 years since the last album anyone really cared about (Google their setlists --- they play more covers than they do tracks from their last LP).
stevage · 1h ago
Not having a clear consent statement or saying what they are doing with the data seems the correct artistic choice.
hamdingers · 1h ago
From the video this appears to be face detection, with some cute strings attached at random to the detected faces.
I don't see evidence of facial recognition.
secretsatan · 20m ago
Aphex twin did this years ago, replacing his sinister face over the faces of the crowd at his concerts
pier25 · 1h ago
how did the code crop faces without facial recognition?
pcl · 50m ago
In the industry, that’s known as face (or facial) detection, which is a different problem than face recognition.
Face recognition means computing which individual from some other database of people a particular face belongs to.
There’s also face tracking — detecting a face in an image and then tracking the same face across subsequent images. Which is often implemented by using a face recognition approach, but without any predefined catalog of people — you just dynamically fill up your face database as faces appear in the image sequence / video source.
Gigachad · 57m ago
Parent comment is saying the system wasn’t linking the faces to real names, just detecting a face in general.
dotancohen · 52m ago
It was detecting faces, not recognizing them.
Recognition implies associating the faces with an ID.
Eisenstein · 53m ago
'Face detection' means it can detect faces. 'Face recognition' means it recognizes the faces. A specific example of the difference: license plate detection will detect the presence of a license plate; license plate recognition will tell you the number on that plate.
MyOutfitIsVague · 1h ago
It displays the faces on the screen, and you recognize them.
arshadomari · 8m ago
This just looks like straight face detection and projection with a random word. How is this recognition?
musesum · 58m ago
Well that was timely. I just requested a refund for my new Zenni eyeglasses because the IR blocking was also blocking my iPhone's faceID.
Maybe I should keep them.
mkw5053 · 1h ago
Has it ever been confirmed if Robert Del Naja is Bansky?
zephod · 51m ago
This lends even more weight to the theory that Massive Attack’s singer is, in fact, Banksy.
ares623 · 1h ago
Now that’s what I call art.
It’s hard to explain the concept of surveillance and its effects to laypeople. And the corporations absolutely know that.
Lerc · 1h ago
The YouTube video is a year old, and says the labels are fake.
Have they done this again with an updated system?
llm_nerd · 40m ago
Are the faces even of audience members? Seems...gimmicky. The faces don't seem to react at all, and all are making almost AI movements. Many look artificial.
And it isn't identifying the people or anything. It's putting some meaningless adjective like "Resourceful" below them.
Have seen this headline a few times and thought it was actually novel and demonstrative of some face database or something, but instead it's just a surveillance gimmick. Put a bunch of generative AI face loops with bounding boxes and adjectives.
"AI assists in refining our editorial process, ensuring that every article is engaging, clear and succinct."
One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt. If your goal is to be succinct, you can't get much more succinct than that.
What is sadly rather ironic is the author's first name, "Al" looks like AI when stylised in the article's font.
Would it matter if the same prompt gives different output? You couldn't verify it.
I think this assumes a very limited scope of how AI gets used for these. As if the article is a one and done output from a single prompt. I can imagine many iterative prompts combined with some copying and pasting to get an hour’s worth of copy in five minutes.
https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
How could you possibly tell? I've been playing around with AI detectors, putting in known all-human samples, known all-AI samples, and mixed samples.
The only thing it's gotten right is not marking a human sample as 100% AI (but it marked one of the AI samples as 100% human).
Having such a mark would be a witch-hunt for sure.
I think more drama has been created around this than is necessary. Based on the video, the real-time projected visitor's faces were not analyzed. They were simply shown with a random description flag attached, such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher." It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar", "twice divorced", "low quality hire", "easy to scam", "both parents dead", "rude to staff", "convicted felon", "not sexually active", "takes Metformin", "spends > $60 on alcohol a month", "dishonest", etc.
None of the people who actually take advantage of you or manipulate you using surveillance capitalism cares if you're a "cloud watcher" or "inspiring"
I do, however, also appreciate how strict the community seems to be about recording without consent. Some people go to burns to be able to completely disconnect from their usual lives without fear that there will be any reprisal for legal/maybe-illegal-but-harmless activities they might do there, and the potential of being recorded can put a serious damper on that feeling of freedom.
[0] https://www.portals.org/
God damn those are 12 great songs!
I also hadn’t really clued in to just how political they were until seeing their visuals, which I also thought added a lot. Surely not everyone’s cup of tea though.
But yes. They do need new material dammit.
I don't see evidence of facial recognition.
Face recognition means computing which individual from some other database of people a particular face belongs to.
There’s also face tracking — detecting a face in an image and then tracking the same face across subsequent images. Which is often implemented by using a face recognition approach, but without any predefined catalog of people — you just dynamically fill up your face database as faces appear in the image sequence / video source.
Recognition implies associating the faces with an ID.
Maybe I should keep them.
It’s hard to explain the concept of surveillance and its effects to laypeople. And the corporations absolutely know that.
Have they done this again with an updated system?
And it isn't identifying the people or anything. It's putting some meaningless adjective like "Resourceful" below them.
Have seen this headline a few times and thought it was actually novel and demonstrative of some face database or something, but instead it's just a surveillance gimmick. Put a bunch of generative AI face loops with bounding boxes and adjectives.