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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

#231

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

quasirandom wrote: post #203
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, these papers don't usually pass the sniff test. My bet is you can predict the phone brand from the camera grain and that correlates with geography & income.

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

#232

Post by idrios »

imwillofficial wrote: post #76
idrios wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the commonalities that exist between people help them overcome their differences, understand each other better and reflect on themselves.

I’m positing that more differences = weaker relationship. Are we agreeing?

For sure. I was just stating why echo chambers are bad. In the context of a dating app, I think dating right now suffers from a totally diffent and unrelated effect where the pool of potential partners has become so big that people have unrealistic expectations in what they want in a partner. So in that context I actually think anything that narrows the list of potential partners is a good thing.

But still, it's yet another facet of our lives where we deal with disagreements by putting them out of sight rather than communicating and understanding.

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

#233

Post by mywittyname »

MikeHolman wrote: post #186
mywittyname wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's evidence of inheritability of political orientation, since it is tied to personality traits. Given that, it makes sense that it is possible to predict political orientation through looks alone. After all, looks are also inherited traits. The article gets into this a little bit. They are able to predict traits like intelligence and honesty by looks alone.

I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily see these results getting used to forward racism and other appearance based discrimination.

I honestly don't see the danger here. This is an incremental addition to an already very large body of research that's existed for a while.

And racism isn't rational. You can't combat racism by suppressing research. If a study came out demonstrating that Alpha Race is smarter than Beta Race, and that Beta Races is smarter than Gamma Race. The racist Betas might use that study to justify their hate for Gammas, but they'd find an entire different reason to hate Alphas.

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

#234

Post by adolph »

laurent92 wrote: post #212
alcover wrote: post #196

How would we collectively react if ML proves accurate in classifying anti-social traits or worse ? Mythomania, narcissic perversion, pedofilia, etc ? Employers, condos, schools, many communities will want to ML-screen candidates, be it officially or not..

We already do it, at least subconsciously. We’ve also developed a side of society who actively tries to counter it, by actively seeking out-of-the-normative profiles: The skater look in companies is now a thing that helps you get sympathy, being female opens up sone avenues, Atlassian’s CEO wearing a mohawk or Jack Dorsey’s looks are all symbols of a society which started searching for non-normative people. Perhaps w…

Ethical AI seems to be a work in progress.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/tech/google-ai-ethics-investi...

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

#235

Post by marklubi »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #152
sillysaurusx wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geography and income are two powerful conditioners. These can leak in so many ways: uncropped background (geography), image color and quality (income), eyeglass shape (geography and income). This study really needs more controls. Geography and income would be a nice start. But then the data wouldn't represent the natural world: nature as it is. Raw data is the correct thing to use, because it's what a hypothetical ot…

Uh, the headline claim is about faces , how does it make sense to then insist that you must leave the background in?

This reminds me of an early ML study about detecting skin cancer from pictures with a high accuracy rate.

The problem was, that with the ML, they ended up building a ruler classifier, because most of the pictures with skin cancer happened to also have a ruler in them to measure the size.

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

#236

Post by Kim_Bruning »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #82
imwillofficial wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain to me how that’s a bad thing? Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true.

> Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true I tend to agree. It's why I find all of the recent "Diversity is our strength" stuff so puzzling. I'm not against diversity, I just recognize that it generally results in at least some interpersonal challenges to overcome, not necessarily unity.

Sic transit "E pluribus unum"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot

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

#237

Post by xmaayy »

MikeHolman wrote: post #186
mywittyname wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's evidence of inheritability of political orientation, since it is tied to personality traits. Given that, it makes sense that it is possible to predict political orientation through looks alone. After all, looks are also inherited traits. The article gets into this a little bit. They are able to predict traits like intelligence and honesty by looks alone.

I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily see these results getting used to forward racism and other appearance based discrimination.

I really hope not. 72% is impressive. But, when you're thinking of making any real world decisions based on it, 72% shouldn't really be considered much better than chance.

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

#238

Post by emteycz »

freebreakfast wrote: post #211
ebegnwgnen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I suppose you can't use them in a publication on Nature if they are scrapped illegally. This dataset directly from the dating website

What does "scrapped illegally" mean? I've never encountered this term. I can see how scrapping might be a violation of some websites terms of use, but I've never seen "scrapped illegally" used. Do you have any examples?

Well, pictures of faces could be considered personal data per GDPR. Scraping that data without each person's approval could be illegal regardless of any terms of use.

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

#239

Post by crazygringo »

randcraw wrote: post #205

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 lean…

There's no definitive definition of "moderate".

People who want to argue most people are moderate say the political middle is the 75% middle of the bell curve, while people who want to argue most people are partisan say the political middle is only the middle 20% of the bell curve.

What is accurate to say is that political views in Congress have bifurcated (not a bell curve), and that people in America have "sorted" -- decades ago many conservatives were Democrats and many liberals were Republicans, but now Republicans are virtually all conservative and Democrats are virtually all liberal. And people's political identities have become more important to them.

But it also continues to be accurate that when people are surveyed according to their actual political positions on issues (as opposed to party affiliation), political views of citizens are still strongly bell-shaped -- they cluster in the middle. (Contrasted with congresspeople who cluster at two peaks.)

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

#240

Post by hntrader »

gzer0 wrote: post #167
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…

Good points and summary. Adding on to that, the following was from the abstract about 2 sentences in. Seems like some users do enjoy jumping straight to the comments! * Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). * Accuracy was similar across countries…

"controlling for ... ethnicity"

There's significant signal buried in here that is likely not controlled for, depending on how granular their controls are.

White-German and White-Italian are much more (10-13 percent) likely to be conservative leaning than White-Irish or White-British.

Hispanic-Cuban are more likely to be conservative leaning than Hispanic-Mexican.

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