AI | >Re-PHOTO

Intellectual Property, Naked Cyclists – 2012

Intellectual Property, Naked Cyclists: On Saturday 9th June 2012 after a rally against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement outside Europe House in Smith Square I went to Hyde Park Corner where cyclists were preparing for the London World Naked Bike Ride, an environmental protest against a society based on oil and the domination by cars.

Rally Against ACTA

Intellectual Property, Naked Cyclists - 2012

Current debates on intellectual property in 2025 are mainly concerned with protecting the rights of individual creators from being used without permission or compensation by companies developing AI which could then use the data taken to create new works which would mimic their work, essentially producing counterfeit works.

Back in 2012 the protests were against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement put together in secret talks between the USA, Europe, Japan and some other major governments to protect the copyrights, trademarks and patents held by major multinational companies.

Wikileaks had released the secrets of these talks, deliberately set up in private to exclude the views of civil society and developing countries. They proposed putting draconian powers in the hands of major corporations without the need for allegations of abuse to be properly tested.

Now in 2025 the government is attempting to put into law an act which would legitimise the production of ‘fakes’ by the major AI companies, though the fight against this is being carried on largely in the House of Lords rather than on the streets or on the web. As usual laws are largely about protecting and advancing the interests of the rich and powerful – whose donations and lobbying keep our legislators on side.

As well as preventing much sharing of material on the web – some legitimately – ACTA would also disrupt much-needed generic medicines to majority world countries, where indiscriminate raids had already disrupted some legitimate supplies. And many musicians and other content creators feared it would be used by the major corporations to prevent or inhibit their ability to profit through distributing their own work via the Internet.

On 4th July 2012, 478 MEPs in the European Parliament voted against ACTA, 39 in favour, and 165 abstained, meaning the agreement did not enter into force in the EU.

More about the protest and about ACTA, along with more pictures on My London Diary at Rally Against ACTA.

Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil

Around a thousand cyclists in various states of undress, some wearing nothing but shoes, took part in the World Naked Bike Ride, an annual environmental protest touring central London, much to the astonishment of many tourists. Shoes are required, but otherwise the dress code is “as bare as you dare.”

*People gathered at Hyde Park Corner for the start of the ride*

Public nudity is not illegal in Britain and the ride seems to cause a great deal of hilarity from some onlookers but little or no offence. Most of those on the pavements were tourists and eagerly taking photographs of the event.

Although there had been many earlier naked bike rides organised as naturist or political demonstrations, the first World Naked Bike Rides were organised in 2004 and now take place in many cities around the world. The rides are a protest against dependence on oil and other forms of non-renewable energy and “expose the unique dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians” in modern cities.

In 2012 there did seem to be a rather clearer environmental message than in some other years, and my pictures here – and in the many more on My London Diary concentrate on this rather than the nudity, and on the many with body paint, sometimes solely for decoration but often expressing an environmental message, contributing to the purpose of the ride to “deliver a vision of a cleaner, safer, body-positive world.”

Back in 2012 there were similar rides in 20 countries around the world ands well as others in Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Glasgow, Manchester, Portsmouth, Southampton and York.

After photographing the riders on the grass at Hyde Park corner I set off with them on foot, rather dangerously as other traffic was still driving around the busy roundabout and along Piccadilly. But I soon got out of breath and had to rest.

Later I took the tube to Westminster and met the cyclists again coming down Whitehall, going with them across Westminster Bridge. I left them to go to Waterloo Station on their way to the City and then back trough Holborn to Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park Corner.

Many more photographs at Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil.

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Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt 2008

Sunday 18th May 2008, 15 years ago today, was an unusual day for me in two ways. Firstly that I went to Birmingham rather than London, but mainly that I went not primarily as a photographer, but as one of thousands of protesters, though that did not stop me taking photographs as you can see.

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence are arousing considerable debate among photographers, partly about redundancy with AI generated imagery already replacing photographers in some areas of marketing and advertising work, but more importantly about authenticity now that you can generate seemingly photographic images of anything whether it actually happened or not.

Of course it has always been possible to make photographs which are misleading and dishonest, either at the point of exposure or later in the darkroom or more recently and trivially easy on a computer. There have been many historical examples and more recent controversies about faking or altering photographs, especially in some photojournalistic environments.

Of course in some areas of photography clearly anything goes. We don’t expect a work of art to be a literal interpretation, but when we come to news or photojournalism we expect things to be true to the event or occasion. And the only guarantee of that is the integrity of the reporter.

Of course as I wrote at the start of my piece on ‘Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt’, “You can’t take photographs without a point of view. Literally and metaphorically so – the rationale for making the picture determines the technical aspects of actually making the exposure. Where you stand isn’t just a matter of where you put your feet.”

I hope that my photographs make my position clear, as do the texts that I write to go with them, though on My London Diary and here I express my opinions as well as stating what appear to me to be the facts which accompany my images sent to the agencies I’ve worked with. I also don’t have to stick within the character limits they impose, typically limiting me to around a 100 words or less. Enough for the who, what, where and when but seldom much about the why, seldom enabling any real analysis of the events.

As my vintage website shows I’d been in Birmingham in May 1998 with some 70,000 others, forming a human chain around the centre of Birmingham, UK where the leaders of the eight richest nations in the G8 were holding a conference.

We were then part of a campaign by Jubilee 2000 to persuade the G8 countries to ‘break the chain of debt‘. Third-world countries were given massive loans in the 1970’s and are now crippled by the repayments, which now mean that a massive amount of money comes from the poor to the rich in repayments.

The noise we made back then made the world leaders come out from their conference room and listen, but then they went back inside and continued with business as usual. As I wrote in 2008, “Our actions in May 1998 had set the ball rolling, but as yet it has only gone one fifth of the way, and 80% of debts remain. All governments, including our own, have been guilty of making many promises that they have not kept on debt relief and aid.“

Things overall have changed little since then, although some countries in the global south have become rather more desperate and more vocal particularly as the effects of climate change increasingly hit them.

I wrote at some length about the day and the protest on My London Diary in 2008 and I won’t repeat that here, but hope some at least will click the link to read it.

At the end of that piece I wrote about the problem for those who didn’t have a long ladder in photographing what was an attempt to form and photograph the world’s largest human pie chart. I can’t find the official photograph on the web and I think it may have been little if any better than mine.

2008 Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt
1998 Jubilee 2000 – Birmingham

Against Facial Recognition

I’m not sure if you need this. But for some people in some countries it could be very important, assuming that it works. I’ve always been very open on-line, posting only under my real name and everything I post is public. I’ve been careful though only to post things that I don’t mind everyone knowing about me.

As a journalist I’ve had some advice and training on privacy issues, particularly on messaging and e-mail, but haven’t ever felt I was in a situation where I needed to put this into practice. But I do sometimes worry a little about my pictures on line and how these might be used to build up profiles of some of those present by legal or illegal groups, including the police who are already making use of facial recognition in various city environments.

There have been various attempts to block facial recognition, both through the courts and through various subterfuges, including the use of masks and special makeup. Covid-19 has surely added to the problems faced by Dynamic Neural Networks in recognising individuals and whereas wearing a mask was often a criminal offence now you may be fined for not doing so.

What is new about Fawkes (it gets its name from the ‘Anonymous’ mask) developed by a team of students at the SAND Lab at University of Chicago is that it is the first tool to enable us to “protect ourselves against unauthorized third parties building facial recognition models that recognize us wherever we may go” that “gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them”, able to defeat the tools used by systems such as https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dmkyq/heres-the-file-clearview-ai-has-been-keeping-on-me-and-probably-on-you-too clearview.ai using deep learning to identify individuals.

The team explain how Fawkes works (and for the technical there is a publication and source code available on the site)

At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking.

They go on to state that “if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, “cloaked” images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you.”

I’ve downloaded the software (a small file available for Mac and PC) and run it on a picture or two. It was rather slow – but my first files were large. I tried it again on a couple of 600×400 pixel images to post here, and it took around 100s to convert the pair.

The differences are real but pretty subtle – easier to see if you right click to download the files then view them one after the other in your image viewer. The change between the two in each pair then gives me a slightly weird feeling

But these were both images of a single person and I thought I’d try it on something rather more complex but the same size. Although it said it would take about 1 minute, 5 minutes later I was still waiting, and waiting…. I went away and did something else and I think it took around 7-8 minutes. There were small differences to most of the larger faces in the image but many appeared completely unchanged.

The input files were all jpegs, but the output files are png, and have roughly five times the file size in bytes. They had also lost their various keywords and presumably other metadata. The files went back to a similar size to the originals when saved from Photoshop as jpg at an appropriate quality level, and it is these I’ve used here. Saving as jpg perhaps very slightly diminishes the differences.

I have of course no way of knowing whether the ‘cloaked’ files would – as the inventors say their trials show – provide at or near 100% protection “against state of the art facial recognition models from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Rekognition, and Face++”, but can only accept their assurances – and presumably their paper gives more details on their testing.

Fawkes is at the moment more a demonstration of concept rather than usable software, and you would have to be very concerned about your on-line privacy to treat pictures with it. But it does show that there are technical ways to fight back against the increasing abuse of personal data and its commercial exploitation by corporations.

Recently we’ve seen complaints being made by protesters about photographers putting their pictures online, with some arguing that their permission is needed or that they should be pixellated. While photographers rightly argue their right to photograph and publish public behaviour as a matter of freedom of speech – and the idea of claiming privacy seems to negate the whole idea of protest, I can see no objection to minor alterations in images which retain the essential image while frustrating AI-assisted data acquisition. It would I think be rather nice if Adobe could incorporate similar technology as an optional ‘privacy mode’.

Images used above are from My London Diary No War With Iran protest on 4th Jan 2020 opposite Downing St.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.