Facing AI: conceptualizing ‘fAIce communication’ as the modus operandi of facial recognition systems

Abstract

This article argues for the conceptualization of fAIce communication as the modus operandi of facial recognition. From apps that claim to determine a person’s trustworthiness, recruiting technology that analyses candidates’ job fitness, through to banks using iris scanning to replace debit cards, facial recognition is increasingly used to communicate information about a person’s identity and personality. Faces communicate and have increased value. Knowing more about how their communicative capacity is effectuated and materialized in contemporary machine culture is thus of heightened importance. The article asks how we might come to think of the communicative capacities of faces in applications of AI, and how their role in current biometric systems may contribute to reconfiguring our understanding of what communication is. In an age of algorithmic and automated systems that are not primarily driven by overt messages purposefully crafted by humans but by machines reassembling data traces into forms of meaningfulness, faces are no longer (if they ever were) meaningful only for humans. This article ultimately makes the case for conceptualizing the communicative potential of faces in machine culture in terms of what I term algorithmic face-work, or more colloquially, fAIce communication.