AI & your portrait

The archive is not training data

Every portrait here was made by the person in it, and shared by choice. It is published for people, not for machines to mine. We do not permit outside AI-model training or text-and-data-mining on this site’s content, and we say so in every standard machine-readable way: our robots file asks known AI crawlers to stay out, every page and image we serve carries a noai / noimageai signal, and we publish a formal Text and Data Mining Reservation reserving these rights.

Seeing the archive by resemblance

We’re building ways to explore the public archive by how portraits echo one another — by visual resemblance, not just date or place. To do that, our own software senses how images relate. This is a way to see the archive, not a way to recognize you: it stays inside our systems, it never puts a name to a face, it isn’t training data for any outside AI, and it leaves out any portrait we’ve set aside as sensitive.

What we will never do

With the portraits people entrust to us, we will never:

• Sell, license, or give your portrait to another company — or let anyone else train their AI on it.
• Use it to generate images of you saying or doing something you didn’t, or to place you in sexual, political, or defamatory contexts.
• Use face recognition to monitor or track you, or to sell, share, or hand your face to another company for those purposes.
• Use any image we’ve set aside as sensitive or intimate for any AI purpose at all.

What we make with AI — only if you say yes

We sometimes use AI as an artistic tool to make our own work, like the Living Portrait. We only ever do that with portraits whose subjects have given explicit, separate permission — a choice distinct from making a portrait public. We never sell or license your image to anyone else, and no outside company trains its models on it. Turning it on is always your decision, and you can withdraw it at any time; we will stop using your portrait in anything new.

Finding your photos, and facial recognition

We deliver your photos using the phone number or email you enter at the mirror, or as a gallery link opened directly on your mobile device. If we can’t reach you that way — or you’d rather — you can start an opt-in facial search to find your own photos across every activation you’ve been part of. You take a live selfie, we turn it into a numeric faceprint, and we show you only your own high-confidence matches — and you decide what happens to each: keep it private, add it to the public archive, or delete it from our backend. If you opt in, we utilize your faceprint only so you can return and gather portraits of yourself; it is never used to monitor or track other people, and it is never sold or shared. The moment you ask us to delete it, we erase your faceprint and the search data. We hold this biometric data with reasonable security, and we don’t run this feature for people captured in Illinois. At our events, your photos are delivered by our partner Spot My Photos, whose privacy-first approach mirrors ours: delivery is opt-in and private — you claim your own photos rather than have them land in a public gallery, and anyone who doesn’t opt in isn’t featured. Spot My Photos treats your event photos as a service, not a data source — it does not use your images for generative AI, does not use your event data to train outside AI models, and keeps your photos siloed to our account, used only to deliver them to you. You can remove your portraits and the data used to find them at any time.

Your choices

Making a portrait public is opt-in. Allowing any AI use is a separate opt-in. To opt out, remove a portrait, or ask us anything about how your image is used, write to hello@selfportraitproject.com.