Microsoft's 'How Old' and Lulu's 'How Dude' Guess Your Age and Dudeness

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 08 May 2015

Microsoft’s How-Old.net website detects gender and estimates age in digital images. Give it a picture and it will detect your face; then it will determine your gender and estimate your age.

Lulu’s How-Dude.me website also analyzes the picture you give it. But instead of determining your gender and estimating your age, it assesses your dudeness level.

Earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out How-Old.net, a website that uses experimental technology to analyze images of people and determine their age and gender. This means that if you visit the website and give it a picture, it will analyze it and determine the sex and age of everyone in the picture.

Mind you, faces have to be clearly visible for How-Old.net to work. Sometimes, even when faces are clearly visible, the site will fail to detect them. Still, that’s not the most annoying thing about it. The most annoying thing is that it will hurt your feelings and make you feel old. During my tests, it almost always tagged me as way too old. In one instance, it said I look 43. I’m 32!

But in this image, it flatteringly tagged me as 27. So I guess that makes up for hurt feelings and I’ll let it slide!



In homage to Microsoft’s How-Old.net website, Lulu rolled out How-Dude.me. It looks and works much like Microsoft’s website, but with a key difference: it detects your dudeness level. It will detect faces in images and use some sort of algorithm to tell you how much of a dude the people in the image are.

Don’t think it’s much better than Microsoft’s How-Old.net website. I gave How-Dude.me the same image I gave How-Old.net. It rated me as 83% dude #HandsomeRedefined, which was flattering. But it also said my coat is 80% dude. And it detected a face in the darkness of the background, rating it as 77% dude. That face belongs to a woman.





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