TikTok’s “Bold Glamor” and “Teenage Look” filters are freaking out its audience

TikTok is really good at keeping users entertained, especially with a barrage of filters. Filters on TikTok have been fun for a while now, and mostly served as a go-to Catch him or Hide your voiceBut two new candidates are scaring TikTokers on a massive scale. Bold Glamor and Teenage Look are the app’s new filters that potentially use artificial intelligence to completely change our faces to an unrecognizable — and unfamiliar — extent.

While I use TikTok on a regular basis, my first experience with the Bold Glamor filter came when my partner sent me a screenshot of her messing with it. To be honest: it was weird. candidate He removed her buccal fat She applied eye shadow, mascara and lip color in one stroke. She was practically unknown, but she was really, really convincing — so much so that she was surprised.

“Dude TikTok filters are so crazy,” she wrote to me in a text shortly after showing me the screenshot.

Meanwhile, the Teenage Look candidate on TikTok has been getting a lot of similar attention, too. The filter shows two videos – one of you as you are now and the other with smoother skin, rosy lips, and a round face. Basically, the app is trying to compare how it thinks of youDr look or look When you were a teenager to what you look like now. While the effect can be as compelling as Bold Glamor, Techcrunch He argues that the real response to Teenage Look lies in its filter, which forces users to confront their own mortality and aging rate.

Scroll through the pages of the respective filters and you’ll find plenty of evidence of TikTok creators who were shocked at how smoothly these filters changed their faces. But there are plenty of filters on TikTok that users make themselves to apply effects to faces, so what makes Teenage Look and Bold Glamor so special?

“The traditional filter takes your screen in 2D, then installs a face grid on top that tracks your face,” said Luke Hurd. in the video Posted on his Twitter. Hurd is a job consultant on snapchat and instagram filters according to the edge. “[Bold Glamour] It actually takes the camera image itself and then processes it.”

Previous face filters relied on that face grid Hurd refers to, which identifies a human face and tracks it in order to apply the filter. This method can cause a brief glitch in the filter when an object (such as a hand) passes between your face and the camera because the filter is confused by the new obstruction. But Bold Glamor and Teenage Look allegedly use generated adversarial networks, or GANs, to Cover your face using machine learning. These filters are also created by TikTok itself rather than by a user or a third party company.

“Simply put, GANs pit two competing neural networks against each other in a fistfight to the death,” Hurd told The Verge. “As it uses you, it then compares the sides of your face to a dataset of images that begin to match your cheeks, eyes, eyebrows, lips, and more.”

As detailed in The Verge’s report, the outlet has reached out to TikTok multiple times and received no comment on whether or not Bold Glamor and Teenage Look use AI, but the dots definitely connect. Similarly, TikTok previously announced in February that filter creators can access generative adversarial networks in the Effect House app, which is TikTok’s home for filter creation tools.

Gizmodo has also reached out to TikTok for more information on the mechanics behind Teenage Look and Bold Glamor and has not yet received a response.