Discriminator: A facial-recognition short doc that watches you watch it
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
It’s not often we direct you to a 15-minute movie, even one that watches you watching it.
Discriminator, Brett Gaylor’s alternatively playful and serious interactive warning-call about the availability of worldwide facial recognition, is making waves at the Tribeca film fest this week, and was labeled a “must-see” by Indiewire.
It’s free to experience on its website, but more on that anon.
Secondly, the B.C.-based Gaylor is living out one of my favourite quotes, from John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?”
Indeed, especially in these polarized times, one of the bravest and most principled things you can do is publicly change your mind.
I first encountered Gaylor’s work with RiP: A Remix Manifesto, his wide-eyed 2008 open source documentary about the revolution that awaited with Creative Commons licenses and shared artistic properties that could be built upon by other like-minded idealists. It was an anti-copyright call-to-arms that seemed far-fetched even then. It is strange to look back at how Utopian many people saw their online future.
Gaylor clearly fell out of love with the ‘Net in the next decade. His 2020 feature doc The Internet of Everything, a tour through the myriad ways the Internet and tech have taken over our lives.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Discriminator may be his most personal film, a retracing of the fate that befell the many photos he’d submitted to Yahoo/Flickr over the years, family photos, wedding photos, etc. Yes, they had been accessed, but not for art’s sake. They were eventually part of the “megaface directory,” a vast archive of photos that provided facial recognition fodder for image-hungry AI programs.
Each photo is a bit of digital information that helps AIs identify people, moods, even symptoms of diseases like COVID 19, or compose “deep fake” videos of people saying things they never said. Add in the almost unimaginable number of photos uploaded on social media and you can only come to the conclusion that Orwell was wrong. Big Brother was not going to take away our privacy. We were going to happily hand it over in acts of “sharing.”
With its short running time, Discriminator is obviously not the last word on the drive to make everyone on the planet identifiable by AIs on sight. 60 Minutes did a disturbing piece a month ago on the haste with which American police forces have embraced facial recognition in making arrests. This, even though some facial recognition programs – I kid you not – have trouble differentiating between Black people. The result has, not unexpectedly, been a spate of wrongful arrests.
It is not perfect technology - yet. Which brings me to the give-and-take between you and Discriminator, should you decide to turn on your camera when you access the website - https://www.discriminator.film/ At a certain point, it decided I was sad, and put a smile on my face. At the end of the film, it assessed my expression as “neutral” with a slight tendency toward “sad.” It then assessed my age, underestimating it by almost a decade.
The program thus became my new best friend, albeit a flawed one.
Discriminator. Written and directed by Brett Gaylor. Available via the online Tribeca Film Festival and for free via https://www.discriminator.film/