Now you can have fun with BG3 face recognition!

Yes, you! And you don’t even need a copy of Baldur’s Gate 3 to do it.

It starts with this article that was published in Ars Technica. The article describes how a software engineer set up a public test of Google’s AI photo interpretation.

I strongly suggest you read the article, then head over to They See Your Photos to test for yourself.

Of course, I don’t recommend that you send real photos to that site. However, I’ve got a pool of “fake” photos for you: any of the pictures I’ve posted in my BG3 series.

You don’t have to worry about asking me for permission. As screenshots from a video game, I certainly don’t hold any kind of rights to the images. Larian Studios probably does, but there are thousands of YouTube excerpts from the game, and Larian has not been inclined to enforce those rights.

Here’s an example from the TheySeeYourPhotos site. Given this photo from my 11th playthrough of BG3:

Here’s the first part of what Google’s AI returns:

Give it a try and see what you think.

Wait a sec… Mayrina is not “dark-haired”, and the AI software failed to pick up that this image is from inside Auntie Ethel’s teahouse, not in an outdoor garden. Oh, well; how can the AI be wrong?

My own reaction: This certainly gives better-quality results than the Mac OS Photos face recognition I previously wrote about. On the other hand, this compares apples to oranges: scene description versus identifying people’s faces. (Does this mean the title of this post is a lie? Let’s just say it’s as accurate as an AI description.)

I don’t find any of this reassuring. But it’s the world we now live in, with AI tracking and making assumptions about us that may come to be interpreted as fact.

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