AI age detector or real people: who guesses your age better?
Upload a selfie to an online age detector and you get one number in a second. Ask a hundred strangers and you get a hundred numbers. Which one tells you how old you really look? The honest answer: they measure different things, and the interesting part is where they disagree.
How an AI age detector works
An age estimation model is trained on large collections of face photos labelled with the person's real age. It learns which patterns go with which ages and, for a new face, outputs its best guess. It's fast, it never gets tired and it gives the same answer to the same photo.
Where algorithms go wrong
A model is only as good as the photos it learned from. Unusual lighting, strong filters, heavy makeup, glasses, beards and angles it rarely saw can push its guess several years off. People from groups that were underrepresented in the training data tend to get worse estimates. And it gives you a single number with no idea of how sure it is.
The wisdom of the crowd
In 1906 the statistician Francis Galton looked at the guesses of hundreds of visitors at a country fair trying to guess the weight of an ox. Individually they were all over the place; the middle value of all the guesses was remarkably close to the real weight. Age works the same way: one person can be far off, but the median of many independent guesses is surprisingly accurate.
That's why AgeDart uses the median and leaves out the guesses that are far from the rest, so one joker can't move your result.
What people tell you that AI can't
Apparent age is, by definition, what other people see. And people don't all see the same thing: AgeDart breaks your result down by the voter's country, age group and gender, so you find out, for example, that younger players see you older, or that one country sees you years younger than another. An algorithm can't tell you how you're seen in Brazil compared to Japan.
Best of both
In AgeDart the AI is a contrast, not the judge. When you post a selfie you can see what an AI thinks, and then the real verdict arrives from people. The fun is in the gap between the two.
Your photo, your rules
Only adults can post a photo, every photo is checked before it goes live, anyone can report a face, and you can pause or delete your photo or your whole account whenever you want.
Put your eye to the test
Guess the age of real people from all over the world, or post a selfie and find out how old the world thinks you are.
Play today's challenge on the web