A Belgian artist has built an AI artwork that monitors more than 450 unsecured cameras around the world, searching each feed for people dressed like the cartoon character Where's Wally, according to a report circulating on social media.
AI art project · Belgian artist Dries Depoorter
An AI artwork scans 450+ open cameras for a Where's Wally costume
The reported project uses an open-weight vision-language model on modest consumer hardware to search exposed camera feeds for people dressed like the cartoon character. It is presented as art, and it puts a spotlight on how easily unsecured video can be scanned at scale.
450+
Unsecured cameras reportedly monitored worldwide
3
Consumer gaming GPUs reportedly running the system locally
1
Open-weight vision model (Qwen3-VL, by Alibaba)
Scale of the camera network
Each block represents 50 cameras. Nine blocks equal the reported 450+.
Takeaway: a single person-hunting search is applied across hundreds of feeds, all of which were left open without passwords or access controls.
How the detection works
1 · Feed
Video from unsecured cameras
→
2 · Frame
Each frame analyzed locally
→
3 · Match
Red-and-white stripes plus bobble hat
→
4 · Flag
Matching people are flagged
The core tension
The same technique that finds a cartoon character could track real people.
Exposure: cameras left open to the internet without passwords can be viewed by anyone.Consent: the people filmed did not agree to be scanned by an automated system.Accessibility: open models on consumer hardware lower the barrier to large-scale visual monitoring.
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