Our culture is obsessed with youth and age is an delicate topic. We all want to look as young as J.Lo FOREVER, right? Despite the fact that if you’re asked to guess someone’s age, you’re supposed proceed with caution. there’s a new website that claims to tell you just how old you really look.
How-Old.net, was created by Microsoft and uses a computer algorithm to guess your age in photos, CNN reports. It’s essentially a computerized version of anyone who has guessed your age way higher than the age you actually are.
The site is simple: all you have to do is upload a photo of yourself, let the computer analyze you, and a few seconds later your “age” pops up. Considering I got an age older than my original number, I obviously despise the program.
All it took to make How-Old.net was a few developers and one day’s worth of time. Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, Engineers in Information Management and Machine Learning at Microsoft, wrote a blog post in which they said that were “optimistically hoping for 50 users for a test, but in the end got over 35,000 users.” I guess everyone wants to know how old (or young) they look.
It’s no surprise this site took off in popularity, it’s pretty addicting. The You Beauty office put How-Old.net to the test and, well, some of us were not happy with the results:
EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Jessica Wakeman, 31
SENIOR EDITOR: Amy Marturana, 25
STAFF WRITER: Leah Prinzivalli, 24
STAFF WRITER: Julie Ricevuto, 23
DIGITAL DESIGNER: Itzy Ramirez, 30
DIGITAL STRATEGIST: Nicholas Dahl, 23
Since it’s so tough to guess someones age, the site even apologizes to their users for any wrong guesses. “Sorry if we didn’t quite get the age and gender right,” it says after each age computation.
Although How-Old.net ruin your day, it is still pretty damn fun — and worth every wasted second.
