[ExI] physiognomy by AI

[BillK]

On Tue, 31 May 2022 at 20:22, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> 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 on accepting students on whether they “looked” gifted. To the philosopher Aristotle, bulbous noses denoted an insensitive person and round faces signaled courage.
>
> 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 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
> _______________________________________________


(The link should be to geneticliteracyproject.org )
The complete article is at
<https://thebulletin.org/2022/05/is-your-face-gay-conservative-criminal-ai-researchers-are-asking-the-wrong-questions/>
They are complaining about the misuse of AI in trying to validate junk science.

Also consider the amount of plastic surgery that is available today.
This makes physiognomy even less relevant.
<https://www.pulse.com.gh/lifestyle/beauty-health/why-south-korea-is-the-plastic-surgery-capital-of-the-world/j7kyx8q>
Quote:
Why South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world
Temi Iwalaiye   May 24, 2022

In South Korea, being ugly, unconventionally attractive or even
ordinary looking is a crime no one wants to be guilty of.
About one-third of South Korean women between the ages of 19 and 29
have undergone cosmetic surgery before.
Plastic surgery is so popular in South Korea that 70% of High School
students undergo eye surgery or receive it as graduation presents from
family members.
--------------------

Some remarkable before and after photos in that article!
Hmm, maybe a trip to South Korea is recommended......


BillK