During Microsoft’s BUILD developer conference, the company showed off a new website that attempts to guess how old the people are in a photo. The results are, at best, mixed.
The website uses Microsoft’s face detection software to figure out if you’re as old as you look. In a blog post about the site, Microsoft developers say that this started off as a test of their machine learning software’s ability to determine age and gender from photos, but decided that it would be “more fun” to open the test to the public.
Quartz ran a photo of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella through the software. Nadella is 47, but the software thinks he’s 56. Quartz also tested the software on this reporter, and it thought it was twice as old as he was. This could, however, have something to do with his hirsute and sartorial choices. But he’s not alone—people have taken to Twitter to complain (or celebrate) how old the software thinks they look.
In the very least, we know this technology won’t work as a stand-in bouncer in American bars.