Post by @404.media

Artist Simon Weckert's designed a button-down shirt with flowery, blurry globs of green and pink. The shirt, which he describes as “digital camouflage." It confuses the algorithm. Weckert designed digital camouflage as a response to the proliferation of AI-powered surveillance cameras that detect people, vehicles, animals, bicycles, and other objects in their field of view. Many of these AI-powered cameras can detect when a person is lying down, “anomalous behavior” such as people loitering, people fighting, or an abandoned package, which can lead to a police response. These cameras are already relatively commonplace around the world, but Weckert created it because police recently deployed these types of cameras outside of Kotbusser Tor, a popular subway stop in Berlin. They are the first police-run object recognition surveillance cameras in the city. “Obviously people don’t like it because it means that AI is tracking the movements and behaviors of people. It’s one thing to have somebody behind the camera watching you, but now we have AI doing this kind of analysis,” Weckert told 404 Media's @jasonkoebler. “It can detect if somebody’s laying on the ground so that means homeless people could be detected and police get triggered.” Link in bio to read the full story.