Ah, the internet. Let’s talk about our most favorite infrastructure for doomscrolling and intellectial numbness. The singular figure we can all blame now for this rabbit hole called the web, Tim B. Lee, says he has “failed it tremendously”.
And yeah, he is right you know. Da weeb is a a sprawling digital cesspit where our dreams go to die, and now, thanks to Artificial intelligence (indeed, with a lower case “i”), your face gets to join the party too.
Because I have found the most disturbing website on the internet
No, that’s not hyperbole.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with p**** either.
This website is unholy satanical lovechild of some tech bros with an Orwellian dystopian view of the future.
What I am taling about is a face-search engine that finds every photo of you online.
Every.
Single.
One.
Sleep tight.
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But hey, AI is our favorite past time hobby
One side of it vows to save humanity (or at least get you through another PowerPoint presentation), while the other churns out feverish nightmares so visceral that they make your sleep paralysis demon downright friendly.
Well, PimEyes falls squarely in the second camp.
What you do, is that you upload a picture of a face, and the AI scours the internet and it stitches together a digital footprint belonging to that person.
Let’s not kid ourselves, though. This friendly looking freak is not about convenience…
This is all about power.
A stalker’s best friend
PimEyes markets itself as a tool for digital self-defense.
Translation: a way to find unauthorized uses of your face and fight back against the murky underworld of stolen identities and catfishers.
That’s kinda noble, don’t you think?
Except that the execution of it feels less like you are handing over binoculars to that weirdo that is always hiding in your bushes.
Some users call it a “stalker’s dream”, and they’re not wrong.
Just think that your least favorite ex (you know, the one with the emotional Hi/Lo frequency of a Rave track) gets her hands on this schtuff.
Oh.. and what about that co-worker who doesn’t really know you but always “likes” your photos from 2014 and never looks into your eyes, cause he is busy looking “elsewhere”.
Congratulations, you’ve just handed them a tool to track your face across the web like it’s a missing sock.
I must admit, there’s a cool thing that you can do with PimEyes, because it does not only find pictures of you, but it also finds pictures of people who look like you.
Doppelgängers!
Sure.
People who vaguely share your facial features, like that big zit that won’t go away, or your Luigi Mangione style unibrow.
Also, yes.
It’s like a cosmic black hole that sucked up your online existence, and spits it back to any perv out there that has taken a picture of you in the subway.
Talking about taking pictures….
Have you read this article before? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-id-strangers-seconds-using-rayban-meta-smart-nerd-marco-van-hurne-9grwe/
It’s about how I managed to hack the Rayban | Meta AI smart glasses, turned on “Object Recognition”, took a photo of an unsuspecting person, connected it to a reversed facial search engine, and it whispered the name of that person quietly in my ear.
(yes, source code included, you perverts….)
Yeah, I know….It turns out that I have the morality of a cockroach, cause I am thriving in the shadows of society’s filth, because I am the high priest of this Godless techno-dystopian world..
Ouch, self-reflection hurts sometimes….
Because, just think about it: how long will it take before tools like PimEyes evolve into something even more intrusive? What happens when I hack the facial recognition algo even more and pair it with predictive algorithms, location tracking, or say social scoring? We’re not far from a world where your face becomes your permanent ID.
Think “Social Credit System” of China, peeps.
Think China.
🤓
Welcome to the new normal
So, here we are, staring into the abyss of our own creation.
AI has given us many things:
- Bots that lie
- Or advise people to just die
- Or help you date 500 women on Tinder
- Hordes of jobless developers
- Flamethrower dogs, and bomb planting humanoids
- Iris scanning orbs to solve world hunger (really)
And now finally, an AI based tool that let’s you profile your next target
So I think this all counts as progress…
But to me, it has become clear that PimEyes is not a product of technology. It is the second stage of the evolution of a society that values innovation over introspection, progress over privacy.
Use it if you must.
Maybe you’ll find something useful, like a stolen photo or a long-lost memory. But remember, every click feeds the beast, training algorithms to dig deeper, crawl faster, and get better at exposing our lives.
And when the robots finally rise, armed not with guns but with everything they’ve learned about us from tools like PimEyes, don’t act surprised.
After all, we built those monster.
We just didn’t think it would have such a good memory.
Signing off from an internet that hoards your secrets like puffy the magic dragon holds its stash of weed,
Marco
Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️
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