How normal am I?

What is How normal am I??

“How Normal Am I?” is an interactive art project that demonstrates how artificial intelligence can analyze faces and make judgments about them. Using your webcam, it evaluates facial features and produces scores for things like beauty, age, BMI, gender, and even life expectancy.

Who created How normal am I??

Tijmen Schep developed the project as part of the European Union’s Sherpa research program, which explores AI’s impact on society. The Dutch version received support from the Province of South Holland through the Unfreezing Freedom project initiated by Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

What is How normal am I? used for?

The project lets you experience firsthand how AI systems assess and judge faces:

• Beauty scores, BMI, and life expectancy predictions based on your facial features, delivered through real-time webcam analysis.
• Machine learning models pre-trained from open-source projects power the evaluations.
• Privacy-first design: all face detection algorithms run locally on your device — no data is sent to servers.
• Optional anonymous data sharing: you can choose to share anonymized data at the end of the analysis, which helps recalculate averages without revealing any identifying information.

How to access it

The tool runs in your web browser. On iPhones and iPads, you’ll need to use Safari, since Apple’s camera access rules restrict other browsers from full webcam functionality.

Why it matters

Beyond the interactive experience, the project is designed to raise awareness of how AI can evaluate people based on appearance — while proving that such tools can be built without collecting personal data.