I guess that makes sense, if you understand nothing about how any of the underlying technologies work.

Soon after launching, however, the company’s law enforcement clients started asking about the viability of running phenotype-generated faces through facial recognition tools. “We were surprised when we heard this,” Greytak says. “It’s just not the intended purpose of the composite images.”

… And I guess that makes sense if you know nothing about how people other than your colleagues work. Seriously, how did they not see that coming?

In another infamous example that Garvie cites in her report, a detective from the NYPD’s Facial Identification Section, after noting that a suspect looked like the actor Woody Harrelson, put a photo of the actor through the department’s facial recognition tool.

Actually, that just doesn’t make sense, haha.

For anyone reading and confused, this face rendering thing probably barely works, and definitely isn’t going to be accurate in just the right way to complement a blackbox face recogniser trained on actual photos. Before you even get close to “is it too powerful” questions about privacy and abuse, “does it work at all” has to be considered.

That might be reasonable if it actually worked in the slightest. The problem is that biology is complicated and can’t be effectively predicted by any computer on earth.

Even if we could, should we?