Corsight AI, a subsidiary of Israeli face recognition maker Cortica, has announced that it is working on software that will generate facial photos from human DNA. The company expects that the technology will be in demand from the police and authorities.
Corsight introduced the DNA to Face product at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York on December 15th. The program is positioned as a tool that is able to "build a person's profile by analyzing the genetic material collected in a DNA sample," according to MIT Technology Review, citing slides from the company's presentation.
It is assumed that the technology will also be able to recognize people by voice, however, Corsight did not provide any details, saying that it does not interact with the press at the moment, since development details are confidential. Marketing materials relating to DNA to Face indicate that the company expects the technology to be used by government and law enforcement. The development advisory board includes James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, and Oliver Revell, former assistant head of the FBI.
The Corsight idea is not entirely new. Human Longevity, founded by Craig Venter and Peter Diamandis and engaged in research in the field of genetics, claimed to have used DNA to recreate photos of faces back in 2017, but these claims caused skepticism from experts. Yaniv Erlich, chief scientist at the MyHeritage genealogy platform, published an article outlining the main concerns regarding the development.
Parabon NanoLabs, also a DNA research firm, is the closest to implementing Corsight's claimed technology. Parabon NanoLabs provides the police with artificial intelligence-generated images of people based on DNA samples. These images are approximate and are assigned a confidence score. For example, the program might say that there is an 80% chance that the wanted person has blue eyes.
Critics of Corsight's development argue that the technology required to operate and support such a system to its fullest is not yet available.
“The idea that you can create a technology that will generate images with the level of detail and fidelity needed to search for a person by matching faces is ridiculous to me,” said Albert Fox Kahn, lawyer and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, an advocacy organization. Surveillance Technology Oversight Project). “This is pseudoscience.”
Jemila Sero of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, is also convinced that the science that could support such a system is not yet sufficiently developed, and the catalog of genes needed to obtain accurate images of faces from DNA samples is incomplete. In addition, experts fear the development will exacerbate the ethics, privacy and bias issues that already surround facial recognition technology.
bbabo.Net