Here is the app that eliminates the man from the photos. The artist: 'Anticipate a post-human future'

Many international newspapers discuss Bye Bye Camera, an app that seems to have aroused a great deal of curiosity. His only task is to remove any unwanted people from smartphone shots and is only available on the iPhone at the time of writing. The creator of the app as well as the artist Damjanski indicated in an interview with TheVerge that "they can lastly take a selfie without appearing in the photograph."

Bye Bye Camera was born in Russia and in cooperation with two engineers was developed by the artist. For "the post-human age," an app is described that "eliminates vanity from selfies, and also from the individual." He continues to emphasize the artistic aspect of the work in an interview with Artnome Damjanski, but Bye Bye Camera can be useful when taking a smartphone photograph and the landscape is more or less crowded. It can not conduct miracles, of course, but it seeks to eliminate the human presence from the pictures by means of AI algorithms.

There is therefore a "philosophical" purpose, but a functional part as well. In this way, the artist describes his "work": "It is an anticipation of a future in which complex programs will replace the human race. It is interesting to ask ourselves today what is a man from the point of view of AI (yes, the lower case is desired). In this case, it is a set of pixels that identify a human being based on previously collected data.

For most of the description, the artist remains with the app's philosophical element, intended to make man reflect on topics like the globe, mankind itself, and its future. Bye Bye Camera utilizes Artificial Intelligence algorithms to remove individuals from photos: it specifically utilizes Yolo's image recognition technology with a neural network that studies the background. The neural network can recreate background details by combining the data, as is the case with Photoshop's "content-aware" tools.

Of course, not all results are of the highest standard, like any automatic tool, but it is not easy to recognize that the background has been manipulated in some specific circumstances. The app is only accessible on the App Store today at a price of € 3.49 and is not available for Android phones. In brief, the latter will still have to use the ancient methods for a while: to yell at visitors and other unfortunate people to get them out of the frame kindly.