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Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

nature.com

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Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#201

Post by [deleted] »

SamBam wrote: post #189
retrac wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we're going to see the same thing we saw in the model that can detect sexual orientation with much better than chance odds. It was, apparently, detecting that gay men tend to take or select images of themselves for a dating profile using a different angle, better lighting, and possibly differences in things like hairstyle and beards. Very anecdotally, I've noticed a possible weak correlation between certain…

Obviously it's looking at something . I feel like everyone is jumping to assuming the authors are implying it's somehow in the person's facial structure, but it doesn't say that. If it's looking at the quality of the photo, or the trim of the beard, that's still interesting. Among other things, it means that you know analyses like this might start cropping up everywhere you submit your photo (job application cover le…

[deleted]

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#202

Post by Pfhreak »

imwillofficial wrote: post #47
Pfhreak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm incredibly curious which political group has a sense of humor in your mind. Because I'm going to guess most folks would say, "my political group".

Can you read my mind?!? ::Looks at you with suspicion:: In all seriousness, I haven’t followed closely, so I don’t know who hates Dr. Seuss lately, they are the baddies.

I think it's yet another situation where everyone is escalating hard from "hey, there are some stereotypes in this particular media that are problematic when presented uncritically".

That initial idea somehow turns into, "The left hates Dr. Seuss" and wild slippery slopes about book burning.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#203

Post by quasirandom »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #171
sillysaurusx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't the claim. The claim here is that we should scrub certain faces from the dataset in order to change the dataset in a certain favorable way.

No that's not the claim. A control is to understand how your model works, it's not what you release as the final product.

It would be nice to see a logistic regression using at least some of the features known to be useful (including geography and income).

That way we can see how much of the performance is from magic AI pixie dust, and how much is from basic 19th century statistics.

Every time I read a paper like this, I have this Margaret Mitchell talk [1] in the back of my mind.

[1] https://youtu.be/XR8YSRcuVLE

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#205

Post by randcraw »

I wonder if the study accurately reflects the lack of political common ground in the population. Are only 28% of us “moderates”?

It’d be interesting to do the same analysis with photos of people taken 10, 20, 30, 40,... 100 years ago to see if the intersection (28%) grows/shrinks historically. Were we always so easily politically separable by our appearance alone?

Has our appearance always revealed our political leanings, or do we now dress in order to make a political statement?

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#206

Post by simiones »

klmadfejno wrote: post #161
wycy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It further notes: > Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.

How does one calculate a metric like that?

They explain: they tested predictions on pairs of faces of teh same gender, ethnicity and age. The result was 69% instead of 72% apparently.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#207

Post by dheera »

utborin wrote: post #138

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifi…

I would be very interested if instead if they first passed it through an indepedently-trained emotion classifier, and then look to see if the emotion vectors alone can predict liberal vs. conservative to some degree.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#208

Post by simiones »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #41
rory wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says in the article that humans got just 55% (so 10% better than random chance) on the same test.

The humans are probably overthinking it. You get ~55% by assuming by answering "Biden" for everybody.

In fact, the dating site dataset was ~54% conservative according to their explanations of included data, but the point stands.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#209

Post by bluecatswim »

function_seven wrote: post #77
hughes wrote: post #44

> Their facial images were obtained from their profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website So, this seems to be doing profile picture recognition, not facial recognition. It's not like they're saying there are physical features in your face that give away your political affiliation - that is to say, putting two people's bodies under the same photographic conditions would probably not create this kind of signal.…

This meme[0] comes to mind. Is this AI picking up on the same types of cues represented below? [0] https://imgur.com/FK0RzKM

Or this.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/330/806/8fc...

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#210

Post by thechao »

retrac wrote: post #181
utborin wrote: post #138

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifi…

I suspect we're going to see the same thing we saw in the model that can detect sexual orientation with much better than chance odds. It was, apparently, detecting that gay men tend to take or select images of themselves for a dating profile using a different angle, better lighting, and possibly differences in things like hairstyle and beards. Very anecdotally, I've noticed a possible weak correlation between certain…

This is all discussed in the paper. The answer is that liberals are more likely to show surprise, less likely to show disgust and faced the camera directly. Much less suggestive was the wearing of beards and glasses where were very nearly in the noise.
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