Artificial Intelligence and Judging Books by Their Cover

June 18, 2020

How many times have you heard, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” The purpose of that euphemism is to teach people that appearances do not define a person’s character. Artificial intelligence has made that idea obsolete according to the Eurasia Review article: “Artificial Intelligence Can Make Personality Judgments Based On Our Photographs.”

Russian university researchers discovered that AI can predict people’s personality from their selfies. Conscientiousness was the easiest of four traits tested to predict and females appear to be more reliable than males. Physiognomy, the study of faces, is a pseudo science on par with inspecting head lumps and silhouettes. There are some strong theories that suggest the human face does contain personality characteristics essential to communication. The Russian university researchers conducted a test:

“Researchers from two Moscow universities, HSE University (Higher School of Economics) and Open University for the Humanities and Economics, have teamed up with a Russian-British business start-up BestFitMe to train a cascade of artificial neural networks to make reliable personality judgments based on photographs of human faces. The performance of the resulting model was above that discovered in previous studies which used machine learning or human raters. The artificial intelligence was able to make above-chance judgments about conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and openness based on ‘selfies’ the volunteers uploaded online. The resulting personality judgments were consistent across different photographs of the same individuals.”

The AI predicted personality characteristics better than humans. The AI personality predictor could be used for shopping, customer service, dating, and online tutoring. It could also be used to support locking innocent individuals up simply because they appear “suspicious.”

Whitney Grace, June 17, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.