This Viral App's "Hotness" Filter Has a Serious Whitewashing Problem
The folks at popular face-transforming filter app FaceApp have issued an apology following backlash over the app's "hot" filter. After multiple posts from users on social media showing how the "hot" setting — indicated with a flame emoji — lightened users of color's skin tones, slimmed their noses, and even reshaped their eyes to appear more Caucasian, outrage began to stir surrounding the implied connection between "whiteness" and "hotness."
FaceApp's founder and CEO issued a statement to TechCrunch about the controversy, explaining:
"We are deeply sorry for this unquestionably serious issue. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour. To mitigate the issue, we have renamed the effect to exclude any positive connotation associated with it. We are also working on the complete fix that should arrive soon."
The whitewashing feature's name has since been changed from "hotness" to "spark" but is still indicated with a flame emoji. And as the FaceApp team races to fix the underlying algorithm leading to this whitened user effect, many are asking if it's too little, too late. Scroll on for more upsetting examples of the app's filter problem.