A Russian developer, whose start-up developed an AI-based app which can show a face without make-up, has been at the receiving end of a blast of biased coverage – which, ironically, has made his app popular and earned him a good amount of cash.
Ashot Gabrelyanov was called a white supremacist, a misogynist and Putin's spy after American media became aware of his app, MakeApp, which is for iOS only.
Gabrelyanov, who has a 10-person development team that includes one woman, was warned against developing the app by the lone US citizen on his team.
"He argued that the US media would dismiss this feature and accuse us of sexism," Gabrelyanov wrote.
{loadposition sam08}Initially, the app received a lot of positive coverage but that was from media in Asia. As a result, it gained high ratings in Apple's App Store.
When video processing was added to the app, Gabrelyanov decided to promote it on BoredPanda. This time, Europe picked up the app and it received wide coverage.
But once American media noticed the app, the tone of the coverage changed. Business Insider ran a story written by a female reporter, Shona Ghosh, that was headlined "A male Russian propagandist is behind an unflattering AI app that shows how women look without makeup".
Correspondence between Ghosh and Gabrelyanov indicates that the website was out to paint the app as both sexist and racist.
Gabrelyanov wrote that other media like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, The Daily Dot and Mashable all more or less reprinted the Business Insider article without any questions as to its veracity.
He said that the American media seemed to incline towards the “Russian-Kremlin-spy-sexist-racist” angle without even asking him anything.
Anti-Russian sentiment has been running high in the US since the 2016 presidential elections when accusations of Russian meddling in the election began to be aired.
Since then, Russian security company Kaspersky Lab has had the use of its products in the US public sector banned.