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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

#41

Post by bryanlarsen »

rory wrote: post #31
kicat wrote: post #18

I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a 50% accuracy using the same terminology as the headline. I'm not saying 72% is not an interesting achievement, its just that "you can do about 50% better than random chance" describes my gut feeling about how much you could actually see in someones face.

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.

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

#42

Post by PeterisP »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #9
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dating app that constrains to like minded potential partners, instead of relying on political signaling in profiles.

More echo chamber...

Well, it's an app for dating, not an app for finding "change my mind" political debate; so being an "echo chamber" is kind of what's desirable for that app.

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

#44

Post by hughes »

> 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.

What this is probably training on is the cues for cultural values that we self-select in our most deliberately promoted images of ourselves. If you have a carefully-chosen profile picture, it probably includes signals of what's important to you, especially if you're using it to attract people with similar values.

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

#45

Post by tyingq »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #25

So, unless I read the abstract wrong, this is identifying age, race, and gender, then making categorical qualifiers based on those distinctions. While using ML to do the facial recognition to distinguish a person's age, race and gender is neat - categorizing their political affiliation with a 72% accuracy rate is fairly nominal, given the tools used by modern parties to garner donations and directed online advertisin…

"VGGFace224 was used to convert facial images into face descriptors, or 2,048-value-long vectors subsuming their core features."

So they had more than age, race, and gender, but it doesn't really say how things were weighted.

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

#46

Post by aboringusername »

I assume there's no way to actually verify how someone may choose to vote, assuming there's no record of that?

I think there's huge value now that everything is being sent into a "machine" or "the algorithm" in fucking with it.

Order sex toys from Amazon, show them you're into outrageous books and fool them into creating a fake profile of "you", based on your spending, browsing and other data you generate.

I'd love to ask a machine what it knows about me, how accurate it is, and then switch it all up. I'm too old to vote now (and will probably be dead soon) but I'd love to pick a position completely unexpected just to throw it off.

Poison the well

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

#47

Post by imwillofficial »

Pfhreak wrote: post #26
dilawar wrote: post #10

May be the world polarising into two kind of extreme polarisization: one with a sense of humor and one without it. And it has a noticeable effect on the face. I'd love to see few samples of faces from each class.

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.

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

#49

Post by callesgg »

ucha wrote: post #20
bichiliad wrote: post #14

> Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK) This sounds more like people who are from minority groups (or who look like they are, to a computer vision algorithm) are more likely to agree with left-leaning policies, which probably has more to do with the policies in those countries than it does with any sort of genetic features. I feel like this might not work as well in non-Western countrie…

"Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity."

So your race accounts for less than 3% despite 89% of all black people voting left, that seams strange.

I did not do the full math but just the ballpark numbers I entered in to my calculator says that it should account for about 11%.

* 89% according to numbers from nbc

Edit: So say I assume that every African American person I see votes left. 13% of the population is African American 89% of them actually vote left. 13% * 89% = 11% Then I simply guess on all non African American a 50/50 shot. I should then be right 50% + 11% = 61% of the time.

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

#50

Post by hirundo »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #25

So, unless I read the abstract wrong, this is identifying age, race, and gender, then making categorical qualifiers based on those distinctions. While using ML to do the facial recognition to distinguish a person's age, race and gender is neat - categorizing their political affiliation with a 72% accuracy rate is fairly nominal, given the tools used by modern parties to garner donations and directed online advertisin…

They tested this question specifically:

> Both in real life and in our sample, the classification of political orientation is to some extent enabled by demographic traits clearly displayed on participants’ faces. For example ... white people, older people, and males are more likely to be conservatives. What would an algorithm’s accuracy be when distinguishing between faces of people of the same age, gender, and ethnicity? To answer this question, classification accuracies were recomputed using only face pairs of the same age, gender, and ethnicity ... The accuracy dropped by only 3.5% on average

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