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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

This gave me an idea - what if we made a stable diffusion based AI that would replace unimportant faces (and possibly other identifying details) with different ones - I have seen that AI can do this and make the change unnoticeable.

That way people would be safe from having their personal likeness and whereabouts accidentally plastered over the internet (except when they want their photo to be taken), and the end result wouldn't look so obviously modified as blurring faces or licence plates.

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That's a solution that prioritizes privacy over reality, and I'm not sure we collectively want that. Mutilation of truth in the name of protection etc...

Yes that's a tradeoff - but I was thinking it would still be better than stuff like Google street view's mess of blurs.

Is it better? At least you know it’s a real face under the blur.

I don't think that's better. For something like Street View that's explicitly supposed to be capturing reality, I want to know when that reality has been censored. Realistic face replacement breaks that.

(And yes, I'm sure Street View imagery is edited in other ways before it makes it to production, but I think it's important that our view of reality remains as real as possible.)

Ah yes, because more AI will solve this problem.

No, what we need is for people to feel safe in public again, for them to not feel like they're constantly one questionable picture away from their lives being ruined. Kill social media, kill gigantic public face tracking dragnets, kill privacy-invading capitalism.

I’m with you. The dichotomy between public and private needs to change. I should still have a degree of privacy even when I’m out in public. What has changed is the ability of others to “see” everyone everywhere at every moment with less and less friction, whether through pictures or videos shared on social media, facial recognition cameras, or location trackers like license plate readers. Historically, no one has had this ability, and now we don’t even know the degree of that ability that some have.

And here I was thinking AI would solve a problem in a way people would appreciate just this once

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