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AWS launches celebrity-spotting-as-a-service: What a time to be alive

Cloud can now ID 'hundreds of thousands' of athletes, pollies, actors, struggles with oiled butt

At last - a cloud service that will get the unwashed masses excited about cloud: Amazon Web Services has added celebrity-spotting-as-a-service to its cloud.

AWS has been doing this stuff since late 2016 when it launched “Rekognition”, a service that offered “deep learning-based image recognition” and therefore the chance to “search, verify, and organize millions of images.”

Now the company says it's trained the service “... to identify hundreds of thousands of people who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in fields that includes politics, sports, entertainment, business, and media.”

There's a demo of the service you can play with (AWS account required) and of course The Register couldn't resist feeding it the most famous celebrity image of recent years: Kim Kardashian's well-rounded-and-oiled rump. Here's how that worked out.

AWS' celebrity recognition service demo with Kim Kardashian

AWS looked Kim Kardashian in the eye and saw Isabel Leonard

As you can see from the image above, the service was able to identify Kim Kardashian's face, but mistook it for opera singer Isabel Leonard, who we imagine is thrilled by the association.

But let's not quibble with that error when we can celebrate being alive at a time when cloudy-celebrity-spotting-as-a-service is a thing we can all enjoy. Throw in the fact that AWS says its list of celebs “is global, and is updated frequently” and the new RecognizeCelebrities function that lets you ID the great and the good, and clearly any complaints about the shallowness of contemporary society are utterly unfounded.

The Reg does, however, note that the service could prove dangerously disruptive to pre-awards-ceremony red carpet interviewers, and suggests any such folk put out of work by AWS find solidarity among taxi drivers, factory workers and IBM workers who live in inconvenient-to-management locations. ®

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