New App Lets Users Erase People from Images

The Bye Bye Camera app, which removes humans from pictures, may have been created as an ode to a future where real intelligence has been replaced by artificial intelligence, yet there is a more immediately practical use for the new app: getting rid of images of people you no longer want to see.

Whether it be a symbolic gesture of a breakup or just the removal of an errant human blocking the Statue of Liberty from view, the Bye Bye Camera app, which was designed by artist Damjanski and the art collective Do Something Good, will remove unwanted people from your photographs using an open-source object detection algorithm called YOLO (You Only Look Once), which is capable of detecting the outline of a person. Once identified, a combination of artificial intelligence systems work to fill in the space the person leaves behind.

Although the results of the extraction have been described as pixelated smears, it is likely better than the alternative, which is to crudely rip a picture in half or throw the image away entirely so there are no lingering reminders of the person being extracted.

Still, a whole new set of issues are bound to emerge when someone notices the framed image of you strolling through the park with your arm, once lovingly draped over an ex, now dangling inexplicably over AI covered space.

Source: Bye Bye Camera