A data point suggesting bias is more accurate than a coin flip...
Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
321–330 of 421 posts
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 72% number is the result when not controlling for demographics. When controlling for demographics, the results ranged from 65% to 71% accuracy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2 It makes we wonder what the accuracy would be if they controlled for demographics at a smaller granularity, like sub-ethnicities. Furthermore, it appears that the Canadian dating site data set was 54% conservati…
"The accuracy is expressed as AUC, or a fraction of correct guesses when distinguishing between all possible pairs of faces—one conservative and one liberal." - so no way to guess better than 50%.
Ah, yes. I missed that.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#323There'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…
avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections
This is a norm nowadays, and a bad one. In some cases it's carelessness or laziness (why go to the effort of reading the article when posting an uninformed contradiction will provide free explanations), in others trolling or deliberate propagation of misinformation.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#324Earlier 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.
That reasoning sounds like a logical fallacy: 1. Personality traits are inherited 2. Personality traits influence political views 3. Looks are inherited -> Therefore, looks influence political views (?) "A is X and does Y" "B is also X, so B does Y as well."
I think the statement is that looks and political views are both observable variables that are dependent the same latent variable (genetics). And that through this link, you may be able to (at least partially) infer one observable variable when given the other.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#325That headline is a bit misleading. The facial recognition has to see two faces known to have different political orientations in order to deduce which face is which. The 72% classification correctness is about what one would expect if only 25% of persons had visible features that identified their political orientation and the other 75% were completely inscrutable.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#326There'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…
Please consider that "conservatism" in 2021 isn't just a political leaning - it requires one to believe a very great number of hateful beliefs that are provably false, and therefore to be constantly disgusted and angry.
Is it so unreasonable that these feelings of disgust and anger are simply readable by machines on people's faces?
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#327There'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…
The 72% number is the result when not controlling for demographics. When controlling for demographics, the results ranged from 65% to 71% accuracy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2 It makes we wonder what the accuracy would be if they controlled for demographics at a smaller granularity, like sub-ethnicities. Furthermore, it appears that the Canadian dating site data set was 54% conservati…
Also: "Overall, the average out-of-sample accuracy was 68%..." (again, this does not control for demographics).
I would not call it "prediction" when the "predictor" was trained on the data set you're testing it against. The out-of-sample number would be more fairly called prediction. It's unclear what the number would be for out-of-sample accuracy corrected for demographics, but we could extrapolate a guess of 64%.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#328> 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
The paper says predicting based on sunglasses use is only 52% accurate, so probably not.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#329Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but ResNet-50 is an old model. I would probably expect multiple-percentage-point gains from using a better (or honestly just larger) architecture and better training methodology.
Throw an ML engineer at this task and you could probably do * way * better than 72%.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#330There'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…
IS it a meat head / not meat head detector?