[ExI] physiognomy by AI

[William Flynn Wallace]

guidelines
<https://geneticliteracyproject.org/glps-aggregation-of-articles-and-use-of-images-under-the-fair-use-copyright-exception/>
.

Troublingly, some modern AI applications are delving into physiognomy, a
set of pseudoscientific ideas that first appeared thousands of years ago
with the ancient Greeks. In antiquity, Pythagoras, the Greek
mathematician, based
his decisions
<https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/physiognomy-the-beautiful-pseudoscience/> on
accepting students on whether they “looked” gifted. To the philosopher
Aristotle, bulbous noses denoted an insensitive person
<https://www.britannica.com/topic/physiognomy-divination> and round faces
signaled courage.

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<https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2022/05/31/do-you-have-a-conservative-face-ai-scientists-dabble-in-pseudoscientific-perils-of-physiognomy/?utm_source=jeeng#elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6IjIzNjE4NDEiLCJ0b2dnbGUiOmZhbHNlfQ%3D%3D>

Recent research has tried to show that political leaning, sexuality, and
criminality can be inferred from pictures of people’s faces.

*Political orientation*. In a 2021 article
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1> in *Nature Scientific
Reports, *Stanford researcher Michal Kosinski found that using open-source
code and publicly available data and facial images, facial recognition
technology can judge a persons’ political orientation accurately 68 percent
of the time even when controlling demographic factors. In this research,
the primary algorithm learned the average face for conservatives and
liberals and then predicted the political leanings of unknown faces by
comparing them to the reference images. Kosinski wrote that his findings
about AI’s abilities have grave implications: “The privacy threats posed by
facial recognition technology are, in many ways, unprecedented.”

While the questions behind this line of inquiry may not immediately trigger
an alarm, the underlying premise still fits squarely within physiognomy,
predicting personality traits from face features.  (excerpt)

from - geneticliteracyproject.com   bill w
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