Two instances of “Face ID” like I’ve never imagined.

I spoke about my daughter not too long ago, and this past week she finally had her first cleft lip repair surgery. She was born with a mid-line cleft lip that extended into her nose and with the first surgery, the most visual defect has been corrected. She still has more surgeries in the future, but we’re taking it one step at a time. This “before” image represents what she looked like prior to surgery, and she is working her way to the “after” photo as she gets older.

The biggest change from our perspective so far is her smile. Her top lip is much narrower leading to a thinner smile, but it’s beautiful in a different way.

Speaking of other unexpected face changes, we saw multiple nurses throughout the week she spent in the hospital, and a lot of them wore face masks. Your brain subconsciously tries to complete the face of the masked person that you’re seeing day in and day out, but then you get surprised when the mask comes off and the face is not what you expected. There were no defects in their faces, but your subjective brain’s reality distortion field was expecting a certain look based on their other facial features and speech.

It’s like those AI experiments people do where they cover half their face with a hand, and ask AI to remove the hand and generate the rest of the face. It’s close, but you can tell there’s something off. My brain’s result was similar to Google’s Magic Eraser and not Apple’s Clean Up, which I consider a huge win for the human mind.

From a digital authenticity and reality point of view, Apple’s Clean Up is better because it is so bad you know the edited photo is not real and the line between reality and falsehood is obvious.