The Janusian face of facial recognition, part 1: Its subface, interface, and surface
The Janusian face of facial recognition, part 1: Its subface, interface, and surface

Summary/Abstract: Facial recognition has a Janusian face. In the instant of its interaction, facial recognition brings many faces together into relation. It is not only visually representational but also computationally re-presentational. To make facial recognition knowable, therefore, one needs first to make its many faces visible. One must expose, so to say, the functional relationalities between rhizomatic facialities within these commercial products and their proprietary computing. Only then can the ways facial recognition technology systems work, and how they are either adversely misused or beneficially used, be substantively challenged or tactically critiqued. Toward this end, from the critical standpoint of a computational semiotics both Peircean and pragmatist, I apply a method of semiotic deblackboxing. I divide my inquiry between two distinct investigations: here in part one, I explicate this theoretical approach; then in part two, I explore its practical application. Across these two parts, I probe how, and in what ways, the artificial intelligence of facial recognition not only comprises a computational, mechanical, and technological system, but also constitutes a semiotic system. The question is this: Does the artificial intelligence system of a facial recognition technology have semiotic agency? That is, is it therefore able to process the action of a sign that has genuine triadic sign relations rather than non-genuine dyadic quasi-sign relations? In other words, is artificial intelligence actually either artificial or intelligent? As I argue here, this Janusian or multiple relation is the intelligent result, not of the semiotic machine, its efficient causation, and allopoiesis, but of the semiotic animal, our final causation, and autopoiesis.

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