What’s wrong with FaceApp, the latest creepy photo app for your face
FaceApp lets users turn moody faces to merry ones, see what they’d look like grey haired and grizzled, and turn back the hands of time, among other things, though it has not been without controversy since launching
FaceApp is an app for ruining your face. It morphs you into an old (or in my case, an even older) person. It can change your appearance to make you look more masculine or feminine, maybe. Take a photo with a neutral expression, and it will force you to smile. It is an app built only to please those who really want a new way to play roulette with their own face.
The app uses neural networks to try to keep the results photorealistic, FaceApp founder and chief executive Yaroslav Goncharov told technology news website TechCrunch in February.
“Adding a smile may look like a simple modification on the surface but, in fact, is extremely difficult,” he said. “Smiling is not just lips moving – the entire face changes in a subtle, but complicated, way.”
The app has been around for a few months, yet has become suddenly popular, especially in the United States, over the course of the past few weeks. God knows why.
Maybe it’s something to do with the unpredictability of FaceApp’s transformations. Take mine, for instance. The “old” filter is actually pretty convincing on me, while the smile looks bad and extremely wrong. But in fairness, the bad transformations can be funny.