Many don’t see eye to eye with U.S. President Donald Trump, with his divisive administration leading Chinese search giant Baidu to integrate a new AR face into its Facemoji Keyboard app for Android devices; a poop emoji dressed up and made to look like Trump. The President’s windswept blond locks sit atop the emoji, its blue eyes are bordered by eye bags and blonde eyebrows, and its thick lips are perfectly capable of recreating Trump’s signature snarl from his reality TV days, or any other facial expression a user may decide to make. It even has a suit collar and tie attached for an ironic touch of class in an arguably low-brow political statement.
Given the intense debate over and reactions to some recent developments in the economic and political worlds, such as football star and activist Colin Kaepernick becoming the face of athletic gear company Nike, it’s not hard to imagine that this unflattering depiction of the President is going to cause some controversy. Since Facemoji’s AR masks can be used to record videos or make GIFs and pictures, it’s not hard to imagine that this new AR mask will be used in memes, viral videos and other media that will get shared around online, which is presumably exactly what Baidu is hoping for.
For those not in the know, Facemoji is an AI-driven keyboard that sets itself apart with unique AR masks that can mimic users’ facial expressions and be used to create pictures, animated GIF images, and videos that can be shared just about anywhere. These AR masks, including things like a pineapple, a unicorn, and a slice of pizza, are part of what gives the app its name. Thanks to its AI chops, it’s also able to lay out emoji predictions with some degree of appropriateness, and it boasts a prediction system for words and phrases that learns individual users’ vocabularies and usage conventions so that it can better tailor predictions to them. Baidu has thrown its AI power behind the app, with conventions like machine learning, neural networking and natural language processing on board to enhance the experience in a number of ways.