UK Edition
FaceApp: Viral selfie app in racism storm over 'hot mode' that lightens skin colour
A new viral app that can change users' faces to match the expressions and style of emoji has been branded as racist after its "hot mode" lightened people's skin and enlarged their eyes.
FaceApp uses facial recognition technology to alter people's selfies to make them, for example, smile, change gender, look younger or swap faces with someone else.
But it has come under fire after its hot mode bleached people's skin colour, gave them larger eyes and removed glasses.
The Russia-based company was forced to apologise and has now changed the name of the filter to "spark".
"We are deeply sorry for this unquestionably serious issue," said Yaroslav Goncharov, founder and chief executive of FaceApp. "It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour.
"To mitigate the issue, we have renamed the effect to exclude any positive connotation associated with it." He added that a "complete fix" will be coming soon.
Other users have complained of the app altering their skin colour to make it darker.
The news comes after FaceApp jumped to the top of the charts in the iOS and Android app stores. Released earlier this year, it uses neural networks to modify images while trying to keep them realistic.
The use of deep learning machines to edit photos has proved popular among consumers, with Prisma and Snapchat both employing similar methods for their successful apps.
It isn't the first time that such technology has been branded racist. Snapchat, which uses similar methods for its lenses, has faced criticism on more than one occasion for controversial face alterations.
Its Bob Marley filter, which superimposed the singer's face onto those of users', was accused of encouraging digital "blackface". While another lens, which appeared to play on stereotypes of Eastern Asians, was compared with a "yellowface".