In a world of data scraping and AI exploitation, is this Sheffield company changing the game by integrating real people into video games, or exploiting people in need of a quick cash? We got stuck into The Sapiens Project to find out where the line between ethical innovation and digital dystopia is.
In the heart of Sheffield, Ten24, a tech company who have been operating for over twenty years are offering anyone the opportunity to capture their faces in 3D and sell their likenesses to be used in their games and developments for £40 cash. The face capturing takes less than five minutes, and you get the cash in hand straight away, then you’re free to just wait and see if you can spot your avatar-ed self in any games. (Even the idea of images of my face, in a vest and bald cap no less, existing in such high quality makes me feel on edge, let alone the thought that my face could pop up in a video game, so we shadowed someone through the whole process, which you can watch over on our YouTube!)
So where can your face be used after they capture it in 30 different crazy expressions? I went to the Ten24 offices to learn more from directors and founder James Busby and Chris Rawlinson about what they’re really using all these faces for.
“There’s two main objectives with Sapiens, it’s completely different to what we’ve got up and running,” James said. “The first is an ethical objective, and then there’s some artistic ones as well.
“The ethical one is that as artists, obviously we’re very against the whole scraping of data and AI, and how some AI models just take data and use it to train their own models. That’s a complete no for me. So what we’re trying to do with Sapiens is firstly compensate people for their image, whether they want to do it or not is totally up to them, we’re not taking anything from them and when we do, we’re paying them for it.
“One of the side effects of that is hopefully to show the big companies that you can do it ethically, you can do opt-in, not opt-out, we’re trying to do something about it, set a precedent rather than just complain. And then for the actual purpose of Sapiens, there’s quite a lot of uses. Our two main goals are that we’d like to try and get rid of the scanning hardware, so if we scan enough people, we won’t need a scanner basically. But the really cool thing we want to do is build a character system. So if we use FIFA as an example, and you want to be one of the players, when we scan enough people, we can train AI to look at just one image, so you can just take a picture of yourself and your face immediately goes straight into the game.”
The project is being advertised for gaming, but the database being built is already world record breaking in terms of the number of faces they have already captured (nearly three thousand), meaning that the applications for such massive new technology has loads of potential beyond gaming.
“We’re talking to the NHS at the moment about building a system for facial reconstruction,” James said, “So if you lose for example your nose, ear or chin in an accident, as long as you’ve got a before and after photo, we can create a 3d model of your face so you can print the part you need for prosthetics. Lots of other stuff is in the early stages too, we’re talking about potentially having a pre-diagnosis system, so if we had a really basic version of our rig that can scan with UV in hospitals and GPs, we could possibly train AI with a big enough database to have an early warning system.”
Whilst the Sapiens Project has only been operating in its pop up shop recently, Ten24 have been going since 2008. They’ve now got a team of nine, excluding their bonus staff in the pop-up Sapiens shop. Despite being such an industry leading company, they’ve never been tempted to move out of Sheffield, instead letting stars and celebrities as big as Denzel Washington, Jake Paul and Tyson Fury come to them.
“If a game’s got realistic looking characters in it nowadays, it’s probably our stuff,” James said. “We are more technical artists now, that’s what we’ve evolved into, but we used to be just pure character artists. We used to make everything from scratch, which was really cool, but it was a lengthy process. And when we built the first photogrammetry full body system, we reduced character creation time from like two months to around a week.”
The Sapiens Project has split opinion for many across Sheffield, and been a real cause of contention. “There’s no way I would sell my face to anyone at all,” Carey Johnson, who works next door to the Sapiens shop said. “I think it’s cool that such mad technology exists here, but I find it somehow dystopian to sell my face… maybe it’s just the wording of that, because it’s just the photos I suppose.”
“We had one woman storm out because she didn’t want to put her hair in a hair net,” James said. “But overall, perception in store has been excellent, overwhelmingly excellent. Perception online is a bit different, some people think we’re selling their data, or using it for advertising, or like the Chinese government.
“I’ve had someone say they don’t want to be the face on a STD medicine, as if a herpes medicine company is going to come to us and say ‘can we buy a picture of a person with a hairnet on?’ I could say yeah it’ll be ten thousand pounds and they’ll just buy a stick image for a fiver, or get it off someone’s Facebook. It’s just not going to happen is it?”
But there are potential darker applications to this technology and database of faces, one that a lot of people are wary of going in.
“My only worry is that I’m going to end up on some kind of deepfake porn thing,” Jess Ware, who chose to get her face scanned said. “You hear of all this weird technology with VR and deepfaking, so it just freaks me out that if these aren’t great people, my face could end up somewhere looking like I’m doing something crazy.”
“We’ve been approached by quite a lot of pornography companies and people like that,” Chris said. “We’ve always turned it down, and we will always turn it down. It’s completely against everything we stand for.”
And it is made clear, it’s in all the contracts and waivers that that is not what any person’s images will be used for. The only thing that does make people raise an eyebrow that they have to sign off is the agreement to ‘waive my moral rights’. “It basically means that in theory you can’t object to how your face is used in a game, like if you can recognise your character as a Nazi for example,” James said. “It’s so unlikely though, most games companies are super paranoid about likeness anyways, so 95% of the time they’ll be changing faces.
“Initially we said that people’s features would be part of a data set that will be used to generate unique characters,” meaning that they’d sort of Frankesntsein together different features, so you might spot your nose or eyes somewhere on a different face, “But then we thought it seems a bit silly to waste such amazing faces. Some people really lend themselves to games, so that’s changed now.”
As someone not involved in tech at all, this was still quite mind blowing to me, and despite having concerns that someone could own my face entirely dispelled, I stated the cliched obvious – it is all a bit Black Mirror isn’t it? “I hear that in the shop about ten times a day,” James said. “It’s far less Black Mirror than picking up your phone, having it scan your face and send that data to a big server in America and then selling you ads and monitoring where you are and all that stuff. What we’re doing is opt in rather than opt out, nobody has to do it at all. Everyone’s getting paid, and has the right to access their data and be forgotten. We’re trying to come at it with an ethical nature.”
They’re the leaders in this niche, but are trying to pave the way for an ‘opt in’ rather than ‘opt out’ culture when it comes to data and what companies can use and sell of ours. And as someone who at best skims through terms and conditions, this is a shift I’d like to see. “It’s probably wishful thinking, it’s a nice idea, but realistically people like Facebook and Google probably aren’t going to care. Maybe I’ll do a TED Talk in five years and say ‘we tried guys’
“It’s so new, so if people are a bit scared of it, I really don’t blame them. And we always say to people our default position is if you come in and you’re unsure, just don’t do it, we don’t want you. We don’t want to take something from you that you don’t want to give.”
In terms of data protection, they really do have their backs covered as well as everyone who participates in the project. They spent a year planning The Sapiens Project, working with three lawyers and data protection officers who work with the police force. All their servers are encrypted, nothing is stored off site or on the cloud or anything, all faces are completely anonymised and information that is briefly kept is GDPR compliant. “We really went to town on it. Everyone in the team has done data protection training, our data protection officer has had extra training, and is a coder as well, so is embedded in all the work that we do. It’s as secure as it can be in terms of data.”
But as artists leading an ethical company, the idea of training AI with this record database seemed a counterintuitive idea. AI is notorious now for stealing from artists to erase their jobs and creativity, but James agreed.
“What some AI companies have done to the art world is nasty, they’ve used artists art against them and monetised a product that actively competes with concept artists and you hear all the time about that, and of companies cutting art departments massively. But with Sapiens, let’s say the argument is that it’s going to take artists’ jobs: like a team of 100,000 artists that can sit in a room and sculpt every single person who wants their face in a game’s face. It’s not taking anyone’s jobs because that just doesn’t exist.
“And the other thing is that character makers have been around for about ten years, they’ve always existed and artists have always used them, so even if we took Sapiens and made a system that the public could use or artists could use to generate their own heads, it wouldn’t take any jobs. There’s maybe four artists in the world who can sculpt photorealistic humans, and that would be like maybe £3,000, takes forever and there aren’t enough people to do it. We’re just streamlining a process.
The Sapiens Project feels like a paradox in a world where our data is often taken without permission: a voluntary, opt-in approach to sharing your likeness in an ethically-driven, artist-led initiative. While it may raise questions about privacy and the limits of tech, it also sets a precedent for how AI and gaming could evolve responsibly and excitingly. Whether you see it as dystopian or groundbreaking, it’s clear that our faces might be the last frontier of the digital economy, but the question is, are you willing to sell yours? For the Sapiens Project at least, the choice is entirely yours.
