Over the weekend, bizarre footage of a facial projection technology circulated on social media in connection with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. The mysterious device shows a headband with a large digital projector, which projects a digital image of another person's face onto whoever is wearing the device. The device was assumed to be a countermeasure to the recent ban on face coverings in Hong Kong. Initially images from the 2017 art project were thought to come from the Hong Kong protests. In fact, the videos came from a 2017 art project called'Anonymous,' created by students at Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands.

A team of engineering researchers from the University of Toronto has created an algorithm to dynamically disrupt facial recognition systems. Led by professor Parham Aarabi and graduate student Avishek Bose, the team used a deep learning technique called "adversarial training", which pits two artificial intelligence algorithms against each other. Aarabi and Bose designed a set of two neural networks, the first one identifies faces and the other works on disrupting the facial recognition task of the first. The two constantly battle and learn from each other, setting up an ongoing AI arms race. "The disruptive AI can'attack' what the neural net for the face detection is looking for," Bose said in an interview.