A different angle on Instagram pictures

September 14, 2022 2:31 PM

The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken.
posted by signal (25 comments total)

I saw this yesterday and my first reaction was to find it a bit creepy. Also the Temple Bar in Dublin is way overrepresented in the examples on the site.
posted by roolya_boolya at 2:37 PM on September 14, 2022

Ok what is open camera?
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:45 PM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Publicly accessible webcams, I guess.
posted by zamboni at 2:49 PM on September 14, 2022

I work as a deep learning researcher and I doubt this person used anything remotely DL-ish. I'm betting simply looking at the time-stamp on the insta post and then scrubbing the video around that time would be sufficient.

If I were to automate it, I'd probably use some kind of human pose estimation and try to match the pose in the instagram image with the pedestrian poses. Maybe refining the match by culling the camera frustum to ignore random passers-by.

I don't mean to be negative, this is neat, but it's also old tech. There's nothing new to be alarmed about.
posted by riotnrrd at 2:56 PM on September 14, 2022 [15 favorites]

As riotnrrd points out this is not really a technical advance.

But then again neither are license plate readers or loyalty cards and they lead to huge potential for privacy invasion. Automating something not particularly advanced like that and making it so anyone (or the law, but usually anyone with money) can do it at huge scale, in this case testing a photo against thousands of possible locations, is a definite advance on the creep scale.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:26 PM on September 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I thought this was creepy and fascinating, but also not creepy because it's all public spaces and if, in 2022, you don't assume you're on camera in a public space, you're not paying attention.

The alignment of the open camera video with the actual photo taken is a really fascinating level of analysis, and maybe the moral of the story here is we're all doing things in public spaces all the time we assume are not being noticed, but if someone wants to notice them they can find out a way.
posted by hippybear at 4:58 PM on September 14, 2022

With a project titled "The Follower", I think the creepiness is a bit intentional.
posted by pjenks at 5:12 PM on September 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I feel like the fatal flaw of this project is it assumes a level of personal shame about being seen taking selfies or having your (clearly posed and staged) photo taken by friends in public. That shame really does not exist the way it used to, I think. Maybe this project should have come out during the height of selfie sticks and selfie stick mockery, when general culture seemed to be at a crossroads on whether or not it's embarrassing to clearly pose by yourself or with one or two other people for an instagram style photo.
posted by Corduroy at 5:13 PM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Both interesting and deeply horrifying at the same time. I don't recall having those two feelings simultaneously before so, thanks you I guess.
posted by dangerousdan at 5:21 PM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

That shame really does not exist the way it used to, I think.

Good. Getting mad about people chimping is one photography moral panic too many as it is. Not feeling ashamed to take your own picture seems like an okay emotional baseline for people.
posted by mph at 5:41 PM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

These are mostly other people taking someone's picture. Not so much selfie as "here's me in this place".

But that's a technical detail and yes, having your photo taken should not be shamed in any way. Photos are so much more a part of life now than back when we were using a film. A transition I have never made mentally so I really don't take many photos. But bless those who do!
posted by hippybear at 5:46 PM on September 14, 2022

Yeah I didn't find this particularly creepy or horrifying. I assume most Instagram posed photos like these are part of a planned photoshoot for personal branding. It would be like using open cameras to record film shoots on city streets: an interesting look behind the scenes of a workplace but not really creepy.
posted by muddgirl at 5:47 PM on September 14, 2022

Oh this is from the same artist that created the "Die With Me" chatroom which is one of my favorite pieces of modern digital art.
posted by muddgirl at 6:00 PM on September 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

The purpose is to…. Make people feel bad? About putting some effort into getting a ‘gram-worthy photograph? It just has tattle-tail vibes all over it. We know those pics are staged so who cares?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 6:18 PM on September 14, 2022

I think the creepy part of this is just "open cameras exist". And I heard about that 20 years or so ago.

If someone posted a video of me from a security camera the best case scenario would be that they posted the moment I was posing for a photo. I already knew I looked OK and a camera was pointed at me...

There is a weird air of shame to it, though, and I guess that's coming from me? Because it certainly isn't in the artist's statement.

It did remind me of this Squarepusher video so I'm OK with it.
posted by mmoncur at 6:50 PM on September 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

if, in 2022, you don't assume you're on camera in a public space, you're not paying attention

Well, sure – but there's a difference between "I know that this kind of thing is hypothetically possible", vs. "I know that some dude has actually gone to the trouble of writing custom software to find video footage of specific individuals and post it on the internet".

The purpose is to…. Make people feel bad?

I see nothing on the site that suggests this uncharitable interpretation.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:11 PM on September 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

Well, sure – but there's a difference between "I know that this kind of thing is hypothetically possible", vs. "I know that some dude has actually gone to the trouble of writing custom software to find video footage of specific individuals and post it on the internet".

Simply you finding out about this being posted as an art project should not dissuade you from having a more active imagination when it comes to basically any other kind of information tracking/pairing that a human mind can imagine and find sources to process for. And most of that would be kept secret, unless it's an art project.
posted by hippybear at 7:21 PM on September 14, 2022

The artist, Dries Depoorter, has many other projects that share themes of surveillance, privacy, and panopticon. For example, he designed one of the exhibits at The Glass Room (previously), “a place to consider how you use technology and how those behind technology use you.” I think the intent is clearly to draw attention to how much surveillance we are under, and make people think about how it might be used in unexpected or unintended ways.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:40 PM on September 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

Both interesting and deeply horrifying at the same time. I don't recall having those two feelings simultaneously before so, thanks you I guess.

Oh, this century has barely got started. We have such sights to show you.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:22 PM on September 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

There is something hilarious about this.
posted by rhizome at 2:32 AM on September 15, 2022

Reminds me of a project years ago where a photographer took pictures of people on the Moscow subway system and used facial recognition to find their social media profiles. Here's an English-language link and another about the project. The project was called "Your Face is Big Data."
posted by msbrauer at 4:34 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Can someone explain a little bit about the technology that puts the green boxes around people?

As an urban design advocate, I am trying to figure out a way to use webcams or old cell phones on wifi to generate walking / driving traffic data in my neighborhood.
posted by rebent at 5:16 AM on September 15, 2022

I'm not sure exactly rebent, but I think OpenCV does this?
posted by jpziller at 7:01 AM on September 15, 2022

rebent: They are probably using something like YOLO or mmdetect. There are any number of sturdy, relatively lightweight out-of-the-box ways to identify and put bounding boxes around objects like people, dogs, bikes, etc.
posted by riotnrrd at 9:51 AM on September 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd bet $50 that this was done entirely by hand. Keep in mind that the artist doing this has context we don't have- maybe he found Instagram posts where you could make a very good guess as to the time the photo was taken based on the caption or on the photos next to it. Even if he didn't, it's just a matter of spending sufficient time scrubbing the Times Square video feed, totally doable if you're only doing it a couple of times for an art project!

Then slap the boxes on afterwards with YOLO, and now you can claim you used AI for your project. None of the reporting on this have asked the guy what AI he actually used- and it's branded as an art project. Shenanigans and/or obfuscation should be assumed.

(if you're an artist with more money than time, just hire some people to stage an Instagram-style photoshoot in Times Square)
posted by BungaDunga at 10:15 AM on September 24, 2022 [1 favorite]