19 Computer Vision News Computer Vision News Rather, it is to do something that on the one hand respects regulatory, privacy-related regulations, and on the other hand provides the same sort of technical solution or answers the same sort of need that was previously satisfied using face recognition technology. “Look, today face recognition is commoditized,” Tal explains. “It's generally speaking a solved problem. You would be hard-pressed to find an image with faces in it that would be too difficult for modern state-ofthe-art face recognition systems to recognize. Take some library that does face recognition that's off the shelf. The thing is, the way that those pipelines work violates privacy regulations. Who owns your face? You think you do. But others think that they own it too!” Tal is not a lawyer and his is not legal advice, only his understanding. WEIR.AI’s goal is to avoid taking people's fingerprints, but still be able to answer questions such as who is in that photo and prevent those cases of name, image, and likeness (NIL) misuse. Tal and cofounder Gary McCoy hope to have their product out very, very soon. “The frontiers today are being able to redeveloping these technologies,” Tal declares, “but in a way that's responsible, that doesn't violate people's privacy, that treats people equitably. This is why, by the way, we are not an LLC, we are a PBC, a Public Benefit Corporation, which means it's an organization that reserves the rights to make a decision based on our mission, not based on what our shareholders want us to do.” To give you an example of just how difficult this problem is, the state of the art in addressing this problem right now is perhaps exemplified by what the actor Tom Hanks did, being fed up and frustrated with the abuse of his image and the absence of a response. He went on his own social media to tell people, look, if you see a picture of me selling something, it's not me. “Not many people have that ability,” Tal admits. “And even that, I don't know how effective. That's fantastic. He demarketed his own image!” But what in concrete is WEIR.AI going to provide as a company or as an organization? “A product that solves these problems,” is Tal’s answer, “based on new technology that we're developing that is an alternative to face recognition built from the ground up. I'd love to tell you about the technology, but obviously I can't! Anyways, the case is not technological. It is regulatory. We're developing new technology in order to provide the solutions and help with these pain points.” WEIR AI with Tal Hassner
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