Q: What inspired you to create automask.app?

A: Sharing pictures of protests and demonstrations is important to spread awareness of a movement. However, there have been reports of retaliation against demonstrators, sometimes by law enforcement utilizing AI to identify individuals in pictures posted on social media. We believe the use of AI against peaceful protesters to infringe on their privacy is not right, and our project was inspired by the need to combat this by providing an AI tool to empower the general public to maintain their privacy.

Q: How does it work?

A: automask.app is a web tool that automatically blurs or anonymizes people from images, which can help protesters maintain their privacy while exercising their first amendment rights. The tool uses a computer vision model to detect and provide a segmentation of people. It then applies a visual mask on top to obscure identifying features.

Author Bio:

Lawrence Chen is an AI-enthusiast and aspiring artist who enjoys making music in his free time.