from Hacker News

Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence

by polm23 on 9/26/21, 12:06 PM with 55 comments

• by advael on 9/27/21, 11:30 AM

  Seeing a lot of "Well but what if it works" here, and I'll weigh in as someone who does AI - including CV-related applications involving convolutional neural networks - professionally and has participated in academic research in that field as well: I would estimate that roughly 80% of all "AI-based inference" that's currently being sold commercially is snake oil. Whether it's ad-tech, malware detection, facial recognition, whatever. There's definitely some promise to these systems, and there are some applications that have already started to bear out, but for the most part the industry is rife with bad data, bad data practices, lack of rigor in the way they scope and define their targets, and rushing products to market well before their claims actually meet even the criteria outlined for the project, let alone any standard of scientific evidence in this field or others. The fact that governments and companies that can make serious decisions with serious consequences are using these systems as-is is a serious problem that is already apparent in several places where they've been deployed.

  For systems that claim to make any kind of psychological inference, I doubt there's a single one you should believe the claims of. Nearly half of human-performed psychology studies in the last 70 years have failed to replicate, including ones whose results have become "common knowledge" (As a field as a whole, it fared quite badly in what's called the "replication crisis"), and many of the very best supported of these supposed AI-psychology insights are, if you look into them, built on assumptions made by these results. Most of them fail to even do that, and rush a rigged result that doesn't generalize to market because they can get paid a fortune by their customers who buy the hype

  100% of all AI hiring systems, AI proctors, AI recidivism predictors, AI drug-seeking classifiers, and anything that, like this article refers to, purports to infer personality traits from faces are both bullshit and dangerous. Maybe there could exist a reality where this wasn't true, but there is absolutely no solid reason right now to believe we live in that reality.

• by new_guy on 9/26/21, 1:09 PM

  > The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern.

  When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it?

  Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts your fee-fees.

• by arketyp on 9/27/21, 10:37 AM

  If there were some truth to physiognomy, wouldn't these systems be the best way to defeat injustice?

• by matthewmorgan on 9/27/21, 12:34 PM

  If faces don't carry information, why are we so good at distinguishing them?