This AI captures influencers in the wild
This AI knows you take forever to take your Instagram travel photos. (Photo: Dries Depoorter)
Every Filipino knows that every family trip has endless photo-ops with varied poses: smiling, whacky, jump shot—you name it. My mom always aimed to get the “perfect” family photo.
One thing I can tell you is that the “perfect photo” often looks nothing like how it does in real life. Getting the perfect angle, finding the right lighting, and ever-so-slightly cropping out people in the background—it takes a lot of finesse.
But I don’t have to leave it to your imagination, because this new technological art project reveals the lengths to which people go to get the perfect, Instaworthy photo.
Surveillance art is a thing now
Dries Depoorter is a Belgium-based artist who creates artworks using machine learning, social media data, and surveillance footage.
Depoorter is no stranger to creating surveillance art projects. He has used Python script and AI to catch politicians using their phones during government assemblies, listen to real-time audio of the surroundings on the exact opposite side of the world, and control unprotected CCTV cameras with a Playstation controller. But his most recent work turned some heads.
On September 12, Depoorter launched The Follower project, which employs street cameras, open-source facial recognition software, and AI to find out how Instagram photos were taken. He got the idea for this project after stumbling upon a live feed of New York Times Square provided by EarthCam, a 24-hour live-streaming channel that utilizes a global webcam network.
While watching the feed, Depoorter saw a woman taking her sweet time capturing the perfect travel photo, and was curious if the photo in question was geotagged to Times Square. He never found it, but this little exercise got him thinking: What if he automated a way to combine publicly available CCTV footage with photos people posted with geotags on social media?
Over the next two weeks, Depoorter collected EarthCam footage of Times Square in New York, Temple Bar in Dublin, and Wrigley Field in Chicago. He then scraped Instagram photos tagged with these locations and used his programmed AI to cross-reference the scraped photos with the CCTV footage.
Not so picture-perfect
While EarthCam footage and Instagram photos posted by public profiles are free rein, that doesn’t mean Depoorter didn’t piss some people off. He compiled the side-by-side comparisons of Instagram photos and surveillance footage into a YouTube video, which attracted thousands of views before it was taken down, mainly due to EarthCam’s footage being copyrighted.
Trademark and Design Attorney Stine Sønstebø attributed its takedown to the poster and photographer owning the Instagram photos, while Computer Science Professor Dr. Jason Hong stated that Depoorter has a possible case for fair use if the material was used for the sake of “criticism, scholarship, or research.”
But privacy rules are different in the European Union where Depoorter is from. The General Data Protection Regulation is a robust security and privacy law that protects citizens’ data, photos, and biometric information. While the law exempts some actions in the name of artistic expression, artists should be aware of how their artwork affects their subjects.
Thankfully, none of the subjects in the project were name-dropped, save for David Rodrigues who gave his explicit permission to be cited in the project. Besides social media exposure, he wanted to highlight what Instagram posts could hide.
“In front of the camera, you can lie if you want. That is the point. You are not happy but you show you are happy,” Rodrigues said.
Keeping everyone posted
Dissecting The Follower can tell us two important things about social media and surveillance.
First, it goes without saying that social media is highly performative; it showcases the highly idealized aspects of our lives which may not even be that real at all. In fact, the Philippines alone doubles the global average of users who follow influencers on social media. This paints the very sad picture that Filipinos will believe anything that “isn’t real,” as long as it’s better than their current realities.
Second, if one guy like Depoorter can access this amount of personal data, what more our governments? We’ve already discussed the extensive access governments have on our personal and sensitive information. This project simply pushes the discussion on how they can use this data in conjunction with our social media accounts further.
And many other surveillance artists think these narratives are also worth sharing.
Regardless of how much we curate our social media presence or even swear off social media completely, surveillance tech reveals the unfiltered truth that we are always being watched.
