Microsoft’s face recognition APIs being used… for porn?
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The porn industry has always been one for finding new ways to make money. So it’s no surprise to announce their latest breakthrough comes from Megacams.me where they just announced the release of their facial recognition feature. Techcrunch says that the site is getting down and dirty with the use of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. The Belgium company behind the site isn’t speaking up on the technicalities of how the facial recognition works.
Megacams.me is encouraging members to upload pictures of someone that they know or idolize to find their perfect fantasy performer. After you submit the photo, you will get a list of models in return that shows the percentage of likeness (the higher, the better). The site says that the algorithms are constantly running to provide the best results. Of course, upon writing this article, the site was experienced a huge backlog of nearly 5,600 already.
Natasha Lomas, the writer of the article on Techcrunch, even went as far to test the facial recognition services provided by Megacams.me. She took a picture of herself and used it to search for the professional doppelganger. To her disappointment, she only got a 41% likeness that didn’t match her at all. In fact, the girls chosen in her ‘likeness’ were often times a different race. Natasha even stated that those below 40% likeness might have even been chosen at random at that point considering how different they looked from her.
The website’s blog post assured members of the site that the search was completely safe and secure – for the user. It seems that the pictures uploaded are only visible for a full day before the private link is deleted. But the risk of being ‘found out’ as a sex performer is now higher than ever thanks to the new feature.
Microsoft’s API for facial recognition is free for the first 30,000 searches. But after that, it charges a measly $1.50 per each 1,000 transactions. That would be chump change for the porn industry. Even Megacams brags that it has a database of over 180,000 cam performers.
