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Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

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Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#11

Post by arketyp »

mdp2021 wrote: post #6
new_guy wrote: post #2

> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it? Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts…

Research, also of correlations (as a starting point), is to some of us "in general definitely a good thing". But. Your use of 'accurately' probably does not consider actual sensible practices in the assessment of data, where you assess the occurrances of false positives and false negatives in more revealing considerations. One of the first online articles found through a quick search seems to be very good already as…

You make a good point of distinguishing between a scientific model and a predictive oracle. I think the political use of pseudoscience isn't helpful though. There could be a lot of understanding to be gained from these systems.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#13

Post by oogabooga123 »

roenxi wrote: post #7
plutonorm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it could work. How do you know there is no signal there? Whether it does or not is an open question in my mind.

Because it would be the equivalent of a natural built-in evil bit and an extremely bizarre thing - for the same reason that the evil bit is unlikely to be used. Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.

> Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.

I wonder which will have more predictive power, the version where you let the AI do it’s thing or the version where you intervene to correct for things that are almost certainly wrong according to you.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#14

Post by version_five »

new_guy wrote: post #2

> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it? Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts…

Two separate things: first, you're correct, there are lots of attributes that can be accurately inferred from appearance (for varying accuracies). I don't see a point in pretending otherwise.

Second, unless demonstrated otherwise, most determinations you could make, e.g. wealth, are not causal, they are effectively a computerized stereotype that looks for some common features the majority of each class share. To me this means facial features are not a suitable basis for a decision anywhere you wouldn't feel comfortable stereotyping.

Put another way, you can easily propose rules that are correct on average but horribly unfair to those that don't conform to the rule. This is true for ML as it is for any other rules. The only ML specific thing here is maybe the basis for the predictions gets obscured to some as something deeper than it is.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#15

Post by advael »

Seeing a lot of "Well but what if it works" here, and I'll weigh in as someone who does AI - including CV-related applications involving convolutional neural networks - professionally and has participated in academic research in that field as well: I would estimate that roughly 80% of all "AI-based inference" that's currently being sold commercially is snake oil. Whether it's ad-tech, malware detection, facial recognition, whatever. There's definitely some promise to these systems, and there are some applications that have already started to bear out, but for the most part the industry is rife with bad data, bad data practices, lack of rigor in the way they scope and define their targets, and rushing products to market well before their claims actually meet even the criteria outlined for the project, let alone any standard of scientific evidence in this field or others. The fact that governments and companies that can make serious decisions with serious consequences are using these systems as-is is a serious problem that is already apparent in several places where they've been deployed.

For systems that claim to make any kind of psychological inference, I doubt there's a single one you should believe the claims of. Nearly half of human-performed psychology studies in the last 70 years have failed to replicate, including ones whose results have become "common knowledge" (As a field as a whole, it fared quite badly in what's called the "replication crisis"), and many of the very best supported of these supposed AI-psychology insights are, if you look into them, built on assumptions made by these results. Most of them fail to even do that, and rush a rigged result that doesn't generalize to market because they can get paid a fortune by their customers who buy the hype

100% of all AI hiring systems, AI proctors, AI recidivism predictors, AI drug-seeking classifiers, and anything that, like this article refers to, purports to infer personality traits from faces are both bullshit and dangerous. Maybe there could exist a reality where this wasn't true, but there is absolutely no solid reason right now to believe we live in that reality.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#16

Post by emteycz »

roenxi wrote: post #7
plutonorm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it could work. How do you know there is no signal there? Whether it does or not is an open question in my mind.

Because it would be the equivalent of a natural built-in evil bit and an extremely bizarre thing - for the same reason that the evil bit is unlikely to be used. Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.

Facial (a)symmetry is an important factor in neurological/psychiatric diagnosis.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#17

Post by bsenftner »

plutonorm wrote: post #4
polm23 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality Oh you mean the thing where it still "works" with faces blurred out because it's not picking up face shape? https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/05/ai_gaydar/ > criminal proclivity You mean the smile detector? https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim... This stuff is bullshit and it can't work. The idea that it could work is magical thinking…

Of course it could work. How do you know there is no signal there? Whether it does or not is an open question in my mind.

> How do you know there is no signal there?

Because the shapes of portions of our bodies do not betray our moral character. It is nonsense, and debating this issue is so tiresome. I've worked in facial recognition for quite some time, and thank gawd nobody where I've worked had over-reaching opinions of our software's capabilities. For example, the "emotion recognition AI" fraudulently being marketed - we howled in laughter when those frauds appeared. However, while interviewing at other FR/ML companies, I meet a horror of over-reaching attitudes. I guess someone can work in trained algorithms and yet carry a head full of conspiracy-theory quality logical connections. That must be the case, because physical shape cannot dictate moral character, and debating the issue is Kafkaesque.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#18

Post by sailingparrot »

oogabooga123 wrote: post #13
roenxi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it would be the equivalent of a natural built-in evil bit and an extremely bizarre thing - for the same reason that the evil bit is unlikely to be used. Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.

> Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power. I wonder which will have more predictive power, the version where you let the AI do it’s thing or the version where you intervene to correct for things that are almost certainly wrong according to you.

An AI doesn't do "it's thing", it learns with the bias the researcher encoded in the model, and most importantly in this case, with the massive bias of the datasets.

Correcting is just steering a bias from one way to another.

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#19

Post by HPsquared »

arketyp wrote: post #11
mdp2021 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research, also of correlations (as a starting point), is to some of us "in general definitely a good thing". But. Your use of 'accurately' probably does not consider actual sensible practices in the assessment of data, where you assess the occurrances of false positives and false negatives in more revealing considerations. One of the first online articles found through a quick search seems to be very good already as…

You make a good point of distinguishing between a scientific model and a predictive oracle. I think the political use of pseudoscience isn't helpful though. There could be a lot of understanding to be gained from these systems.

Perhaps there should be more of a hard boundary between science and politics (like the separation between church and state).

Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

#20

Post by mojomark »

new_guy wrote: post #2

> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it? Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts…

> When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it?

90% is fairly poor regression model success rate. If you're in the 10% of those falsely accused of being a future murderous pedofile based solely on your facial bone structure, then imprisoned or institutionalized for that, I'd think your conclusions on this topic may change.

Remember the Blackstone ratio (1).

Also, physiognomy was a key attribute of Nazi eugenics goals (2) - that's the rabbit hole this work leads down.

It's not about protecting feelings, it's about remembering history and learning from mistakes to protect liberty.

Lastly, regarding the goal to predict a person's "sexuality' by any method, I would posit that the motives are most likely strongly against vice for liberty for all. What else would that information be used for, other than to oppress?

1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

2.) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275738773_About_Fac...

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