What happened
A new study has revealed that ChatGPT can perform facial recognition, age estimation, and gender detection tasks with notable accuracy. The research was conducted by teams from the Idiap Research Institute, Mizani Research Institute, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
While ChatGPT is programmed to avoid answering prompts involving sensitive biometric information, such as facial data, the researchers were able to bypass its safeguards using crafted prompts.
This allowed them to test ChatGPT’s ability to recognize faces, estimate ages, and detect gender. According to their findings, ChatGPT showed considerable accuracy in distinguishing between two facial images and performed reasonably well in age estimation and gender detection.
The model was trained on datasets containing thousands of real and synthetic images, enabling it to handle biometric tasks like facial recognition. However, the researchers emphasized that the study also demonstrated the ease with which prompt engineering can overcome the privacy safeguards embedded in ChatGPT.
This finding points to potential vulnerabilities in LLMs when it comes to protecting sensitive data like biometric information.