Unless you have been living on Gilligan’s Island with Elvis and the Loch Ness Monster, you will be familiar with a certain social media platform based around pictures of people’s faces.
I am not going to specifically name the platform, as they are famously litigious. Also, its owner is both very wealthy and brand new best friends with a certain president of a certain country who would think nothing of having me abducted and sent to Guantanamo Bay to be tortured – or worse – Mar-a-Lago to listen to him speak.
So I will refer to the platform via the impenetrable pseudonym ‘Mugshot’.
Mugshot is widely used by people to post valuable updates to their connections, such as photos of what they had for breakfast, photos of what they had for dinner, photos of their cat in places it isn’t supposed to be, and warnings not to accept friend requests as they have been hacked for the 351st time. Probably because their password is the name of the aforementioned cat plus their birthday (the person’s birthday, I mean, not the cat).
For a long time I avoided joining Mugshot, because I eat cereal for breakfast and do not own a cat. However, during the pandemic it was necessary for QLS officers to join so that we could provide valuable updates to members of the profession (typical update: ‘pandemic – still on’).
Given that many people, by week four of the pandemic, had been driven mad by being forced to deal with their family 24/7 and had resorted to working from the couch in their track pants while mainlining Mars Bars (not that I am saying I did that) the efficacy of the updates is perhaps questionable.
In any event, now being a Mugshot user, I have password #272, and recently I forgot it. That meant I had to get a new one, which involves me proving that I am me (cue the theme music from Jaws).
Once upon a time this was easy – you clicked a link, they sent you another link, and a code by text. You typed that into the link, answered a few security questions about your cat, and away you went. Unfortunately the good people at Mugshot found out that this method actually worked, and people were regaining access to their profiles, which just would not do.
Now, instead of that process, you have to take a selfie, and AI – the same AI that is largely famous for hallucinating case names that don’t exist and making up stuff about badgers – will decide whether you are you. Guess how that worked out?
That’s right – despite AI supposedly being very clever, it decided that I was not me. Why it thought anyone would lie about looking like me remains a mystery, but what it meant was I had to wait for a human analysis, which I was advised would be completed between now and March 2027.
I wasn’t too upset about this, because – and I know this will be hard to believe – this was not the first time I had been rejected based on how my face looks. Indeed, in high school pretty much every female I knew adopted a similar process. The particular look I was cultivating at the time was basically, ‘not as many pimples as you might expect, but still more than you’d like to see’ and it wasn’t really going down that well.
I was still nervous at being referred to actual humans though, because humans aren’t infallible. I know because of an incident back in law school, during my cohort’s first-ever law exam. We had to put our ID cards on the table so that the supervisors could check that we were who we said we were.
This was fine except one of my friends – who was quite a handsome young fellow – had somehow managed to get what the Guinness Book of Records regards as the worst ID photo ever. My mate looked like Fred Flintstone would have looked if he had, after the cancellation of the show, drunk all his money, turned to heroin and ended up living in a wheely bin.
(Don’t worry, it all went well – my mate signed a stat dec to say he was him, passed law and went on to a successful career as a lawyer, and does not live in a wheely bin. At least, not any more).
I have no idea what AI would do with a photo like that – probably contact NASA and tell them one of their dead aliens from Roswell had escaped. What is really concerning, of course, is that facial recognition AI is likely the way that Mugshot and other platforms will enforce age bans. That will present a problem for celebrities like Cher, whose real age is approximately 267, but has parts of her face that are less than month old (with more coming soon).
What about other celebrities, who have had so much plastic surgery that they look like versions of themselves in a Lego movie? Did Mugshot even think of the celebrities? Won’t someone please think of the celebrities?
What would happen if a Kardashian tried to log on, and the AI suddenly starts screaming ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!” and hunting down all the Kardashians? It would be great, and I would pay good money to watch; but we have to consider the possibility that it will start targeting humans as well.
In any event, I eventually got back in to Mugshot via the expedient method of finding where I had written my old password, which still worked. Also, I expect that any month now the humans at Mugshot (assuming there are any left) will confirm that they consider me to be a life form, or at least a lawyer, and I will be fine if I forget my password again.
If they reject me again though, and you see me in a wheely bin, please toss me a Mars Bar.
© Shane Budden 2025
One Response
That is hilarious Shane!