Not surprising at all. It's a form of dazzle camouflage that has previously been shown to confuse facial recognition[0]. It's probably possible to design it to be more effective yet less intrusive than juggalo makeup.

I would have actually expected it to be more popular by now.

[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle/

What this really shows is how brittle a lot of facial recognition systems are once the input stops looking like the clean training set. It does not take some magical anti-AI trick. A small shift in landmark geometry, contrast, or occlusion is often enough to push confidence off a cliff.

The hard part is not recognizing a well-lit passport-style face. The hard part is deciding how the system should fail when the real world gets messy or adversarial. If the fallback is bad, you either lock out legitimate users or quietly accept weak matches.

That is why I think the useful benchmark is not top-line accuracy. It is how gracefully the system handles weird, low-confidence, real-world inputs.

Isn't being non-white good enough to not be identified as you? Sure, you might get identified as someone else altogether, but that's moving the goal posts from just not being identified. /s