I was scrolling through someone’s social media timeline and noticed they had a lot of selfies. The idea popped into my head that this is where actual AI (not NLP / Natural Language Processing, that people are CALLING AI) could be used – even if just for fun. Remember the videos of people who have taken a photo of themselves every day for the past “X” years? Actual AI could look at one (or all) of your social platform timelines, do face recognition to find you, then compare each photo of you against every other photo of you to figure out your age in each image. Once the photos are in order, create the video time-lapse of your life, as if you took a photo every day for as long as you’ve been posting selfies online.
This may already be ‘a thing’, but had I not seen it or heard anyone mention it before. As actual AI goes, distinguishing differences in facial features like wrinkles, drooping skin, hair color going from dark to grey, and analyzing changes in weight, shouldn’t be all that difficult. AI could also take into account the date the image was posted (though people often post old photos of themselves from high school, or old jobs, etc.) along with evaluating the text that was posted with each photo, as people often say include context like “Here’s an old photo of me from high school.” or “My trip from 10 years ago to Disneyland.” I’m quite sure these databases already exist for spying on people, and as of this writing, I don’t have any idea on how to monetize it, but it certainly would be fun. I’ll enjoy looking back at this article in a few years when there’s a tool that does exactly what I’m talking about now, and thinking – Hey, I had that idea :)