Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey aims to overwhelm and confuse these systems by presenting them with thousands of false hits so they can’t tell which faces are real.

The Hyperface Camouflage project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face.

“You can change the way you appear but in camouflage you can think of the figure and the ground relationship. There’s an opportunity to modify the ‘ground’, the things that appear next to you, around you, and that can also modify the computer vision confidence score.”

Harvey’s Hyperface project aims to do just that, he says, “Overloading an algorithm with what it wants, oversaturating an area with faces to divert the gaze of the computer vision algorithm.”

“A lot of other researchers are looking at how to take that very small data and turn it into insights that can be used for marketing,” Harvey said. “What all this reminds me of is Francis Galton and eugenics. The real criminal, in these cases, are people who are perpetrating this idea, not the people who are being looked at.”

Source: HyperFace Camouflage – Adam Harvey

And to go with that fabulous idea, here’s an optically confusing album: