Tech day Sunday – Make up remover app that will gaslight you

This week a controversial photo editing app is under heat for its make up removal feature.  There have been lots of women speaking out against this 0.99 cent Artificial Intelligence app that removes the makeup off of any photo and video. 😱

I had to try it for this post.

Have a look!


Pretty crazy right?  I then began playing with the app some more because I thought it could be gaslighting me.

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Melania Trump
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Jennifer Lopez
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Jennifer Lawrence
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Kim Kardashian
Angelina Jolie
Taylor Swift

🤔 this app has some nefarious intentions.

After you download the app for free it allows you to create up to five pics with and without makeup then you have to pay to play if you want more.  The app also gives you an option to add makeup up to 11 different filters, but it is a heavy make up hand like you are going to the West Village Halloween parade look by the time you hit the 11th filter.

Ashot Gabrelyanov (Creator of app) said critics misunderstand the app.

“I want to stress that this was not intended to be a misogynistic product,” he told HuffPost over email. 🤔

“We built MakeApp as a fun experiment and released it into the wild a few months ago and unfortunately the media coverage solely focused on the makeup removal function of the app and characterized it as a bunch of ‘tech bros’ trying to hurt women, which is just so far from the truth,” he wrote, mentioning that the company has women on the team.

Another problem users of MakeApp have reported is that the app appears to lighten their skin tone. Several have posted images online showing this effect.
Gabrelynanov claims MakeApp does not lighten skin.

“MakeApp doesn’t lighten skin color. We didn’t receive messages or comments from users describing this bug,” he said. “Our neural network was trained on a dataset of people of different skin colors and nationalities.”

Of course, the app doesn’t actually remove makeup from someone’s face — it uses an algorithm to figure out what a person in an uploaded photo or video might look like without it. (That algorithm will sometimes add wrinkles and blemishes to a user’s face, which is something Gabrelynanov told Mashable he’s “hoping to fix.”)

What do you think?

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Photo credit:  Roza, Google images

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