HowNormalAmI

Overview

HowNormalAmI is an interactive documentary/art project, launched in 2020, that lets visitors experience how face-analysis AI judges their appearance: after granting webcam access, the site scores beauty/attractiveness, age, gender, facial expression/emotion, body mass index, and estimated life expectancy, and compares the visitor's scores with the average of previous visitors. Its stated purpose is critical and educational — to reveal how biased and manipulable such systems are; the artist notes these kinds of scores are already used by real-world services such as dating apps, insurers, and hiring tools.

All machine-learning models are open-source and pre-trained (the age/gender/emotion models come from FaceApiJS; the BMI model was trained by the artist; the life-expectancy figure is a simple table lookup the artist says has "very little merit"). The official terms state: "No personal data is sent to our server in any way. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. All the face detection algorithms will run on your own computer, in the browser." Sharing data is strictly opt-in and anonymized, used only to recalculate the average and not shared further.

The project is 100% free — a publicly funded, non-commercial art project; no pricing exists, so pricing fields are not applicable. It is web-only and requires camera access (on iPhone/iPad it works only in Safari, per the official site). Credits: Dutch artist Tijmen Schep; made as part of the EU's SHERPA research program with Horizon 2020 funding (grant agreement No 786641).