Turns Out I’m Not Famous (or in the Force)

"Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they'd seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C ... The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell's class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept tracked of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those?"

Virtual Light by William Gibson, 1993

Via the always overwhelmingly delightful Web Curios, I present Copplegänger, a facial recognition tool that tells you what... NYPD officer you look like. So, full circle?

Odd Thing The First: While that Gibson passage above is one of the few things I remember about that book thirty (!) years later, it's never occurred to me to look for online tools that tell me what celebrity I look like. It turns out there are a lot of them!

Odd Thing The Second: While I did try out "upload my own picture to a random website" to see what cop I look like, somehow I was more comfortable doing that than uploading my photo to a celebrity matcher. Small scale web art projects engendering (hopefully not misplaced) trust and all that.

Anyway, I got three matches, but it's the closest matches, not perfect matches, and an impartial observer who is much better at recognizing people than I am has assured me that I don't look like a New York police officer. But apparently the system only has about 30% of the force represented, so I guess I just don't look like those people. So there's two pieces of personal info shared today.

(Not a real badge, but yes, an AI-assisted one, with strong Dangerous Demos/why am I not just doing this myself vibes)