Surely, Facial Recognition In Porn Will Not Go Horribly Wrong

The Internet exists because of pornography. People can argue this point, but the Internet itself proves the lie. It is a machine that turns out hours of video, reams of fiction, terabytes of images, all dedicated to the most basic of human needs. How could it be improved, according to a startup? By adding facial recognition!

We’ll just cut to the chase in Forbes’ profile of this entreporneurs:

“There’s a trend in the US for people to look for porn featuring people they, like, know,” says Harry Manno. “We wanted to assist in that. You can already scour the internet to find people who look like the person you have in mind, but we are cutting out a big step.” [Their program] allows photographs to be matched using key facial features, hair color, body type and even ethnicity. Scan a picture of two people in and it will even show you footage featuring pornographic lookalikes for both women, perhaps at the same time.

Needless to say, because these guys are all under 24 and don’t understand the concept of marketing, this is designed exclusively to find women. Somewhat glossed over are the disturbing implications of this.

First of all, if you can punch in any photo, and find a lookalike or the person themselves, well, that ends badly a little too often. We live in a world where a teacher can be fired for having a photo with some alcohol in it; what’s going to happen when somebody decides to pretend they’re doing porn, or just somebody that looks like them doing porn?

These guys are even well aware of this: Forbes couldn’t get them to talk about their “legitimate” side business. They just don’t care; they want to be the Steve Jobs of porn.

Then there is the ever present problem of stalking, which rarely comes up in mass media as it relates to porn stars. It happens a lot, and they can be disturbingly persistent. So, that’s just two ways this seems like a bad idea. But we’re sure the Internet will find still others!

×