A new interactive documentary called How Normal Am I? lets you experience how artificial intelligence (AI) judges your face. It reveals how algorithms that score us on beauty, age, gender, emotion, body mass index, and even life expectancy, are increasingly finding their way into society. Tinder, for example, uses beauty scores to match people who are about equally attractive. Similarly, BMI predictions based on just a photo are used in the health insurance industry.

What is this test about?

You take the How Normal Am I? test by using your webcam, and your anonymous scores are then used to compare you to all the people who have taken it before you. The creator of the project, Dutch artist Tijmen Schep, explains that this is very close to reality as these AI systems are increasingly used to rank us in relation to others. Schep worries that, in the long run, these profiling systems may incentivise us to be as average as possible.

The documentary was made as part of the European Union's SHERPA research program that explores the ethical and human rights issues surrounding AI and big data analytics.

Through this project, Schep hopes to demonstrate the unreliability of these smart information systems. While taking the test, the age prediction AI, for instance, can easily be manipulated by moving your face up and down. Likewise, your beauty score may go up if you turn on the lights. Say if you want to get a lower BMI score, all you need to do is raise your eyebrows.

Besides being easily manipulatable, the algorithms are highly biased, too. The beauty scoring algorithm was trained on photos that were given attractiveness scores by Chinese students, giving it a Chinese sensibility of beauty. Unsurprisingly, it was, then, rendered incapable of even detecting black people's faces properly.

The perils of facial recognition technology

As you may have already realised, your data is continuously collated to create multiple predictions about you. And this profiling is no longer used to just show you better advertisements; it’s starting to impact all aspects of your life, from getting cheap car loans or insurance, to finding a job or even a date.

It is no secret that websites are able to aggregate surfing behaviour by recording your mouse movements and the text you enter into online forms. But while you can try to protect yourself from this tracking online by, say, deleting your browser’s cookies, it’s much harder when it comes to your face which you can't really delete or even change. That’s why any biometric tracking, enabled by facial recognition algorithms, can be as enduring as inescapable.

As face recognition technology percolates our daily life, finding a place in shopping centres and policing operations alike, it can create a massive challenge of protecting user privacy. As with all new innovations, we must, therefore, learn to balance the short-term benefits with the long-term implications of this surveillance culture.

• Try the How Normal Am I? test yourself at this link

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