Who is your Doppelgänger?

I remember this being a trendy social media topic in the early 2010’s. People would upload a photo of themselves to a facial recognition app, a built in algorithm would then scour images on the internet trying to find YOUR celebrity look-a-likes. Outputs generally looked something like this:

Neda you look like:

87% Jaime Lee Sigler
73% Nelly Furtado
60% Paulie Shore

A timeline of my personal experience with this app:

Step 1: I would upload an acceptable photo of myself to the app and let the algorithm do it’s thing, it would then produce a list of celebrities it believed looked like me.

⏰ Total Time Spent: 1 minute

Initial assessment: The app was incompetent.

Step 2: I would be forced to step in and micromanage the inept algorithm, until it became competent at its job, producing an acceptable list of celebrities. Around the 8th or 9th photo I would be forced to upload (generally a blurred photo of myself in a crowd from 4 years ago) the app would finally deliver an output that would be mutually agreed upon. Great!

⏰ Total Time Spent Teaching: 45 minutes

Step 3: Social Medial must know! The photo is posted to Facebook/Instagram with a well thought out caption that reads something like: “You guys, this app thinks this is who I look like? I don’t see it, but here you go.”

⏰Total Time Spent: 15 minutes

Step 4: Carry on with your day with the comfort of knowing there is a well trained computer algorithm out there that is 90% error free and only 10% asshole. Good enough.