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Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
- Kluny 6y agoIt's an easy trick when there's only two options: red and blue. - The rest of the word.
- yikesshescute 6y agoThen going long or short on a security is easy?
- Kluny 6y agoSure, you could probably train an AI to get 72% accuracy on that as well. It would be just as meaningless.
- motohagiography 6y ago> These self-selected, naturalistic images combine many potential cues to political orientation, ranging from facial expression and self-presentation to facial morphology. I was going to ask how they controlled for the presence of compound bows & deer, trucks, and tank tops in the photos, but this implies they did not. Another one would be lighting palette, since that's going to be biased to regions as well. There is something to be said for it, as I'd say I have a %72 chance of guessing someones political orientation by looking at them as well, which someone once explained to me as being the effect of testosterone levels on the region around their eyes, but that sounded like folksy bro science.
- ralusek 6y agoI was going to ask the same about colored hair, facial asymmetry, hammer and sickles on shirts, and scowls.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bigwavedave 6y ago> I was going to ask how they controlled for the presence of compound bows & deer, trucks, and tank tops in the photos, but this implies they did not. Another one would be lighting palette No need to read into implications. From TFA: "The procedure is presented in Fig. 1: To minimize the role of the background and non-facial features, images were tightly cropped around the face and resized to 224 × 224 pixels." While tightly cropping the face isn't perfect, it does address three of the four things you were specifically wondering about.
- jlev 6y agoWhen are people going to stop rebuilding high tech phrenology?
- Bakary 6y agoWhen it will cease to be profitable or seemingly so
- human 6y agoMy political orientiations have changed a few times over the last 10 years but my face hasn’t. This can’t actually work...
- _cs2017_ 6y agoFirst, your face has changed over the past 10 years because of the aging, the way you take care of your face, your health, your mental and emotional state, your sleep, your nutrition, and many other factors. Second, the model in the paper did not only look at the face, but at the entire photograph. How you choose to present yourself on a dating site has also changed over the 10 years: the quality of the photo, what haircut you choose, how closely you shave, whether you're tanned, your facial expression, whether you wear glasses, what objects, landscapes, and colors can be seen in the background, etc. Finally, and most importantly: Even if your dating site profile picture hasn't changed in lockstep with your political leanings, that's fine -- they can make some errors and still get the 72% accuracy they report.
- relaxing 6y ago72% of the time, it works every time...
- Kranar 6y agoYou think your face hasn't changed over the last 10 years? You think there isn't a relationship between age and politics?
- human 6y agoYou’re right that I’ve gained a few pounds and look older. Obviously I was exagerating to make a point. But I guess it’s all about the 72% which means it far from perfect, but still better than a coin toss.
- ebegnwgnen 6y agoIt reminds me that Israeli company (Faception) which claim to identify from your face if you are a terrorist. It was shown that it was bullshit and that they basically built a smile detector (because ofc, in training set, photos of criminal in prison weren't really happy to be in prison) (also, how ironic for an Israeli company build such tools, they are literally building the equivalent of the Nazi's nose measurement)
- marshmallow_12 6y ago>they are literally building the equivalent of the Nazi's nose measurement I got downvoted for saying this before. Downvote me again if you want. [Edit: read what i have to say first this isn't a game] Nazis and Hitler should be off limits. Period. You wouldn't dare accuse people of colour of imitating slave traders, yet you think it's acceptable to do that to Jewish people. The evils Hitler inflicted has no parallel. To compare any aspect of Nazi ideology to something else trivialises their memory. You demonstrate that you have no sympathy for their victims. You don't really care or understand what Hitler and the Germans did. Casual comparisons like yours means that the lessons learnt from the holocaust will lose their power and ultimately be forgotten. I believe this to be far worse then merely perpetuating anti semitic tropes. You would never do one, so why the other?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anoonmoose 6y ago>Downvote me again if you want no problem, any time HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." I agree, and I vote accordingly.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoyou think its a joke?
- imwillofficial 6y agoI find this fascinating, with no intention to start a political battle, how might somebody’s biology influence their political leanings?
- toomuchtodo 6y agohttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-genes-of-left-and-right/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-genes-of-left... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154620300553 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12230 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12230
- imwillofficial 6y agoThank you!
- zapdrive 6y agoSkin color. Features resulting from inbreeding. Features due to your gender. Features resulting from gender change.
- dogsgobork 6y agoInbreeding?
- wongarsu 6y agoI'm not sure where GP is going with this, but for example the Habsburger lower lip [1] is a easily identifiable feature from inbreeding in Western European nobles. If you can identify it it gives you a good clue about the socioeconomic class of the person, which gives you a good clue about their political orientation. I'm sure many more subtle examples also exist. 1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburger_Unterlippe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburger_Unterlippe
- 6y ago
- endisneigh 6y agoWhat's a useful application of this, other than more advertising?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoDating app that constrains to like minded potential partners, instead of relying on political signaling in profiles.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoMore echo chamber...
- imwillofficial 6y agoCan you explain to me how that’s a bad thing? Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true.
- idrios 6y agoBecause the commonalities that exist between people help them overcome their differences, understand each other better and reflect on themselves.
- imwillofficial 6y agoI’m positing that more differences = weaker relationship. Are we agreeing?
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoThat depends a bit. Differences can complement each other. Some people might be better at some things, while others are better at other things. (thus combining strengths) Some people might actually be really bad at some other things yet again, while others could happen to be very good at them (thus covering each others weaknesses) When you have people with different backgrounds and training all working together you can do things together that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do separately.
- dilawar 6y agoMay 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.
- umvi 6y agoBoth the far left and far right have no sense of humor because both have lost all sense of reasonableness. On the right you have Trump cultists who loyally cling to every word he utters, regardless of it is true or not, spreading lies and misinformation on social media about voter fraud, vaccines, etc. You also have covid denial on the right where "the constitution" is used as a bludgeon to resist any reasonable public health policy like mask usage. On the left you have the wokeness mobs that go around trying to cancel/censor/destroy every historical figure/book/statue who didn't live a perfect life and destroying careers of anyone who says the wrong word or makes a bad analogy. You also have covid zealotry on the left where "covid deaths prevented" is prioritized above all else and we can't re-open schools, re-open businesses, visit grandparents, or otherwise get back to normal life (even after mass vaccination) until 100% of all remaining unknowns are known (even if it takes another 2 years of masking, zooming, and hermiting). These are all very recent examples.
- A12-B 6y agoThe far left is pretty good at making fun of the right for saying silly things like this, actually.
- Pfhreak 6y agoI'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".
- imwillofficial 6y agoCan 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.
- bichiliad 6y ago> 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 countries, for example.
- ucha 6y ago"Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity."
- callesgg 6y agoSo 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.
- rayiner 6y agoThe study looked at political orientation (liberal versus conservative or left versus right), not political affiliation (Democrat versus republican). 89% of African Americans vote Democrat for complex historical and sociological reasons. But they have a large diversity of political opinions: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-roots-of-black-political-unity https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-roots-of-black-politic.... About 30% of Black people today identify as conservative, versus 10% in 1970. But Democratic Party affiliation has been in the 90% range throughout that whole period.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- drivingmenuts 6y ago> Their facial images (one per person) were obtained from their profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website. Not sure I’m entirely comfortable with that.
- jpxw 6y agoPerhaps conservatives and liberals upload different kinds of face images to the internet.
- drivingmenuts 6y agoNot the issue. The issue is potentially being included in a study unintentionally, that is impossible to anonymize, without prior knowledge or consent.
- zbendefy 6y agoAltough random guessing is 50% right?
- kicat 6y agoI 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.
- statstutor 6y agoA 72% score on this scale is equivalent to confidently knowing 44% of the answers, and coin-flipping the rest. It's doing something that untrained humans are not capable of [edited to add: although humans were apparently tested by a different method, so this is not properly comparable], but is still a failing grade by usual methods of assessing human knowledge.
- stanrivers 6y agoThis is an important point - 72% is interesting, but its a 22% added to the chance to guess correctly... still interesting though
- rory 6y agoIt says in the article that humans got just 55% (so 10% better than random chance) on the same test.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThe humans are probably overthinking it. You get ~55% by assuming by answering "Biden" for everybody.
- stanrivers 6y agoSo... now, is it because people that came from the same regions a long time ago all happened to tend towards a certain political leaning and that just has stayed within families for that long?! Like a culture thing, but within families? In general, though, its amazing how little control we have over who we are despite the feeling that we are in control of it.
- roamerz 6y agoCould be but not across the board true. My parents are deeply liberal to the point of the Constitution be damned so long as their views are enacted in some way. I am just the opposite - a constitution conservative. I am aware of several friends families that are the same or opposite. I think the key to you last comment is how much intellectual control someone has over their emotional response. I like to think I am pretty good with that at this present time. That was not always the case and may not always be the case.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI want a facial recognition tool that tells me what information I am leaking. We need a haveibeenpwned for facial recognition.
- yikesshescute 6y agoWhy play defense when you can play offense?
- marstall 6y agohow about this tool in realtime, a kind of biofeedback mechanism that trains you to look conservative, liberal, sexy, dangerous, harmless etc.?
- zwieback 6y agoThe article discusses the underlying correlations at work but I think the title is a bit sensationalistic. Would expect more from Nature.
- k0htlane 6y agoNote that it's not published in the journal Nature, but in another (lower-impact) journal of the same publisher (Scientific Reports).
- UnpossibleJim 6y agoSo, 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 advertising - no offense.
- tyingq 6y ago"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.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y agoI don't really buy this study. If humans can't get a better accuracy than 55%, I'm convinced this vector is leaking some obvious (maybe high-frequency) information that doesn't have anything to do with the face. E.g location of the person.
- tweetle_beetle 6y agoI hope you're right, otherwise we're in for some kind of AI phrenology nightmare in the not too distant future.
- ebegnwgnen 6y ago"The dating website sample was provided by a popular dating website in 2017. It contains profile images uploaded by 977,777 users; their location (country); and self-reported political orientation, gender, and age." It doesn't sound like people were consenting/aware that they'll endup on a facial recognition study. But I'm not even surprised dating website would sell their such data
- MattGaiser 6y agoThere are plenty of scraped dating website datasets lying around.
- ebegnwgnen 6y agoYes, but I suppose you can't use them in a publication on Nature if they are scrapped illegally. This dataset directly from the dating website
- sillysaurusx 6y agoHa. Hahaha. I wish. I'm sorry to laugh, but a ton of ML papers are based on illegally-scraped datasets of one form or another, unless they use strictly blessed datasets (Imagenet2012 being the gold standard mostly-useless-in-the-real-world dataset). OpenAI's Jukebox is based on illegal large-scale gathering of copyrighted material, for example.
- freebreakfast 6y agoWhat does "scrapped illegally" mean? I've never encountered this term. I can see how scrapping might be a violation of some websites terms of use, but I've never seen "scrapped illegally" used. Do you have any examples?
- emteycz 6y agoWell, pictures of faces could be considered personal data per GDPR. Scraping that data without each person's approval could be illegal regardless of any terms of use.
- karpierz 6y agoThis isn't a study that shows that people's faces indicate their political leanings. It's a study which shows that pictures that people select to represent themselves publicly have features that indicate political leaning.
- kicat 6y agoAgree. Even the few pixels bordering the face in the sample image can show she's outside. She chose a smiling picture, she's wearing makeup, etc...
- jonbronson 6y agoThat's a really good observation to note. The prior embedded in their image data is their own bias of what is a "good" representation of themselves.
- bsenftner 6y agoYep, I'd look very closely for training data bias.
- derekam 6y agoExactly. There was some fuss a while back about a similar classifier for sexuality. It turned out to be guessing mostly based on head tilt, personal hygiene and whether the person was wearing glasses. The physiognomy component was ~nonexistent even though it was publicized as though it weren’t. People intentionally if at times subconsciously present themselves in a way that signals information to kindred spirits. You’d need to bring in hundreds of people, wash them and basically take mugshots to control for that.
- nathias 6y agoThe problem wit this is bad interpretation, people look at it and think oh this means political orientation is somehow inherent to biology or some such nonsense. Any data that can make predictions is just a sign that in this data there are some patterns, but there is never a straightforward interpretation for it. Also, whoever makes the first app for this will go viral 100%.
- umvi 6y agoSurprising, yet not surprising. As the article mentions: > 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, as evidenced in literature and Table 1, in the U.S., white people, older people, and males are more likely to be conservatives. Most people can predict a person's political orientation of their own country with >50% accuracy as well just by looking at a face. Black or latino? probably liberal. Old white person? probably conservative. If you can see more than just their face it's even easier (wearing religious paraphernalia? LGBT paraphernalia? etc?) What I thought was interesting was: > The algorithm could successfully predict political orientation across countries I was under the impression that "liberal" and "conservative" had different meanings in UK vs. USA so how could it do this?
- rsynnott 6y ago> I was under the impression that "liberal" and "conservative" had different meanings in UK vs. USA so how could it do this? I assume they're using the US definition (meaning "left wing" and "right wing", more or less).
- greeneggs 6y agoI am curious how much additional information, if any, is learned from a person's face. From a full-body photo, with the face blacked out, what can be learned?
- Agingcoder 6y agoI haven't read the paper yet, but it's not that surprising. I think it's about sociology more than biology. In the US, African Americans vote overwhelmingly for democrats for example. Skin color therefore becomes a very good predictor of political orientation. You can probably extend this to states being populated from various migration waves, say 'people who look like Danes vote for republicans because state X was populated by Danes and votes Republican' . Carry this across generations/education, and you may have an explanation.
- asah 6y ago"only"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hughes 6y ago> 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.
- function_seven 6y agoThis meme[0] comes to mind. Is this AI picking up on the same types of cues represented below? [0] https://imgur.com/FK0RzKM https://imgur.com/FK0RzKM
- bluecatswim 6y agoOr this. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/330/806/8fc.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/330/806/8fc...
- function_seven 6y agoThank you. That’s a perfect “opposite” collage
- weberer 6y agoThe paper says predicting based on sunglasses use is only 52% accurate, so probably not.
- fc373745 6y ago> images were tightly cropped around the face and resized to 224 × 224 pixels
- aboringusername 6y agoI 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
- yikesshescute 6y agoThe machine will know which sort of person tries to fool it in the way that you are trying to fool it.
- jfk13 6y ago> I'm too old to vote now There are places with a maximum voting age?
- rsynnott 6y agoPresumably they're a cardinal. Cardinals aged over 80 aren't allowed vote for pope.
- 542354234235 6y agoThis is the only reasonable explanation.
- larkost 6y agoFrom Amazon's perspective you have not poisoned the well... you are someone who is likely to buy those things. Amazon does not care if you really like or even use them, it only cares if you buy them.
- cirenehc 6y ago> "Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity." So if I just assign the majority label to all of the population of a given demographics group, I would get the same result right? i.e., predicting "left" for all minorities under 30. You would also get ~70% accuracy.
- anigbrowl 6y agoWhat do you think 'controlling for age [,etc]' means?
- cirenehc 6y agoPlease state what you want to say. No need to be passive aggressive.
- anigbrowl 6y agoYou quoted the part about controlling for age, then described the sort of mistake that comes from not controlling for age. So I would like to know what you think it means, in order to meet you where you are. I'm not expressing aggression toward you.
- cirenehc 6y agoMy interpretation of control is fixing all other variables (the ones they mentioned) except for the one being measured (political orientation). If that's not what they did I'm happy to learn.
- anigbrowl 6y agoIn that case I don't understand your original comment, as it describes the sort of mistake that arises when you don't control for other factors, but you appear to accept that they did.
- 6y ago
- the_arun 6y agoIt is like saying - My intuition usually works great. 78% of the times I have been successful with my assumptions/speculations.
- touringmachine 6y agocould we please not
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoWho wants to take bets on how long before the paper gets cancelled and forced retraction?
- mc32 6y agoI can see making inferences from dress, makeup, style, etc. But, this is surprising; “facial morphology” This skims somewhat close to people who tried to infer criminality from facial and cranial characteristics... a century ago
- goatinaboat 6y agoBut, this is surprising; “facial morphology” You could probably get this from how fat their face was, or how unhealthy their complexion, e.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5e3z7/gym-bros-more-likely-to-be-right-wing-assholes-science-confirms https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5e3z7/gym-bros-more-likely-...
- ip26 6y agoI don’t think it’s crazy, what if rural areas (which lean conservative) have biased ethnicity? For example, if the Irish, Italians & Asians mostly immigrated to urban areas while Germans and French mostly immigrated to rural areas, then if you can guess the ethnicity from facial structure you can make a guess on political leanings.
- souprock 6y agoA century ago, phrenology failed. Would it fail if you added a modern AI? How about if you had an MRI that provided more-direct information for the AI model? Feeding actual brain structure data into an AI is far more sophisticated than measuring heads and feeling for lumps.
- astrea 6y agoI question the dataset used for this and the basis. They used "self-reported political orientation, age, and gender" and "facial images (one per person) were obtained from their profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website". I first question the ethics of what sounds like a Facebook scrape. Second, I wonder how well they normalized across the terrible filters and frames and variations in pose. Finally, I question the basis in regards to the ability to gauge one's "openness to experience" let alone, say, "opinion on immigration policy" from micro-expressions in the face (or at least those which could be interpreted by a VGG based facial recognition algorithm). Edit: One last rant about this palm-reading-esque pseudoscience: I hate that this was put out in the universe, and thus potentially giving the wrong person ideas.
- mabbo 6y agoI think the key line is how much better this system is than humans attempting the same task: > Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). This isn't a matter of "recognize that old white people are conservative", because people will do that already, and they know all those biases. And the system doesn't lose much accuracy when comparing otherwise similar people. This system is picking up on things we don't notice. Maybe it's the photos themselves (they are self-selected), maybe it's micro expressions in the face, maybe it's something else entirely. But damn it's neat and maybe frightening. Imagine if your next hiring manager had a quiet little camera in the corner and chose you based on your predicted approval of unions.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoBut damn it's neat and maybe frightening. Imagine if your next hiring manager had a quiet little camera in the corner and chose you based on your predicted approval of unions. This is the dystopian vision of the future I come to HN for. Bravo! (It's also why I do ML, since I'll be on the front lines to notice if something like that is being deployed. Or at least somewhat more likely.)
- mabbo 6y ago> This is the dystopian vision of the future I come to HN for It's what I'm here for. Fascinating technology- how might I ruin the world with it?
- alcover 6y agoSorry for my platitude but ML is only a tool. Nefarious usage gets counter-balnced by e.g. identifying tumours.
- coldelectrons 6y agoIt doesn't balance out; nefarious usage is going to cause many, many tiny harms that are harder to detect, and many larger harms that will be excused, up to and including denying that beneficial use of indentifying tumors, because algorithms are going to be presented as beyond reproach. Beyond detecting union affinity, maybe someone will also makes its ML twin that predicts how much they can underpay someone.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paulsutter 6y ago> the relative universality of the conservative–liberal spectrum Grey tribe members may beg to differ https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/rise-liberaltarian https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/rise-liberaltarian
- input_sh 6y agoAnyone not living in a two-party system begs to differ, especially those living in countries where liberals are conservatives (in a sense the term conservative is used within the US).
- swebs 6y agoNot really. Other country's liberals are the USA's Libertarians. They're much different than neocons.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- williesleg 6y agoThat's so ageist, racist, sexist, etc. so offensive there nature.com
- spamizbad 6y agoIf you can guesstimate someones age bracket, gender, and whether or not they're white you can also probably hit a similar accuracy.
- Out_of_Characte 6y agoI just wish people called it 'correlates' instead of prediction since ML algo's often fall in the correlation category, not the predicting one.
- adolph 6y agoAgreed. Without the addition of causal inference this is phrenology in ML drag. To their credit the authors say "Here, we explore correlations between political orientation and a range of interpretable facial features. . ." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204378-the-book-of-why https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204378-the-book-of-why
- yikesshescute 6y agoIs there some technical definition of “predict” that you are assuming?
- Out_of_Characte 6y agoPredict can give the false impression that a causal relationship has been defined when you might only have correlations.
- gruez 6y agoCan we run the model in reverse (eg. deepdream) to see what the stereotypical liberal/conservative looks like?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jm_l 6y agoThe main classifier they use is using logistic regression, so no. They do mention that a deep nn had similar performance, but even if you deep-dreamed it you wouldn't get images, you would get feature sets, since they first run the photos through a feature extraction model (i.e. the input to the nn is not raw pixels).
- kthejoker2 6y agoOh man, a whole new generation will get thisliberaldoesnotexist.com, thisconservativesdoesnotexist.com, thisfascistdoesnotexist.com .. On a serious note, sounds like the dating and hiring sites are going to need to hire an all new layer of ethicists and legal teams to defend against algorithmic discrimination.
- utborin 6y agoThere's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results. - Yes, this is doing more than just detecting a person's race, age, and/or gender. The classifier is still accurate when they compare people with the same race, age, and gender. See Results. If you want to discuss actual limitations in the study, here are some the author points out: - "A more detailed picture could be obtained by exploring the links between political orientation and facial features extracted from images taken in a standardized setting while controlling for facial hair, grooming, facial expression, and head orientation." - "Another factor affecting classification accuracy is the quality of the political orientation estimates. While the dichotomous representation used here (i.e., conservative vs. liberal) is widely used in the literature, it offers only a crude estimate of the complex interpersonal differences in ideology. Moreover, self-reported political labels suffer from the reference group effect: respondents’ tendency to assess their traits in the context of the salient comparison group."
- vipa123 6y agoYou sir/madame, are a saint!
- gzer0 6y agoGood points and summary. Adding on to that, the following was from the abstract about 2 sentences in. Seems like some users do enjoy jumping straight to the comments! * Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). * Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. * Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.
- 6y ago
- magwa101 6y agoBetter than polling and probably better than voting. Just walk by a camera and get the "i voted" sticker. Love it.
- system16 6y ago> The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust. Facial hair and eyewear predicted political orientation with minimal accuracy (51–52%). This is really interesting. I never considered head orientation or expression to be a factor. Then again, it sorta makes sense. Speaking very generally, liberal leaning people on social media probably tend to be more likely to post pictures of themselves in a humorous or "soy face" expression, and conservative-leaning types may try to look strong or aggressive. Also, I automatically assumed features like "handlebar moustache" would mean more likely to be conservative, but it sounds like facial hair wasn't as big a factor.
- reaperducer 6y agoGenerally speaking, these sorts of things don't make any sense to me. People change as they age, as they get new experiences, when they live in different places. How can someone's face tell you what their political orientation is? When I lived in Texas, I was considered a liberal. When I moved to Chicago, I was considered a conservative. When I moved to Seattle, I was considered a conservative. When I moved to the desert southwest, I was considered a liberal. Nothing about my face changed. Just my address.
- TheButlerian 6y agoNot that hard actually. Chads - conservative, soyboys - liberal.
- randcraw 6y agoAssuming this analysis has no problems with method, it's likely that the separation of any two groups on a continuous spectrum cannot ever reach 100% accuracy. In fact for such multivariate groupings as opposing political persuasion, 72% may in fact be as good a score as is possible. Representing the conservative and liberal groups as gaussian mixes of multiple atributes, I would expect those two peaks to overlap. Perhaps the real surprise is that they overlap no more than 28%.
- alcover 6y agoHow would we collectively react if ML proves accurate in classifying anti-social traits or worse ? Mythomania, narcissic perversion, pedofilia, etc ? Employers, condos, schools, many communities will want to ML-screen candidates, be it officially or not..
- laurent92 6y agoWe already do it, at least subconsciously. We’ve also developed a side of society who actively tries to counter it, by actively seeking out-of-the-normative profiles: The skater look in companies is now a thing that helps you get sympathy, being female opens up sone avenues, Atlassian’s CEO wearing a mohawk or Jack Dorsey’s looks are all symbols of a society which started searching for non-normative people. Perhaps we’ll require AI to do the same. Otherwise AI will be an excuse to be racist, saying “It’s the stats!”.
- adolph 6y agoEthical AI seems to be a work in progress. https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/tech/google-ai-ethics-investigation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/tech/google-ai-ethics-investi...
- alcover 6y agoOK but attributes like the mohawk are 'playful' in this setting. It distinguishes its bearer by making him look aggressive while still being a good, collaborative member. On the opposite, ML could indicate that in spite of one's hippy looks he really is a potential ruthless monster.
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y agoI am curious about something: is there a possibility that this is due to technical aspects of the images? For instance: The type of camera used will vary in ways correlated with the person's lifestyle. Richer people will be more likely to use a recent flagship, for instance. Various brands have different popularity with different groups. Perhaps the algorithm is picking up on the different models of camera? The pictures are drawn from various different websites. Perhaps these websites use different software or different settings to compress images and the algorithm can pick up on that. Perhaps old photos are compressed with different settings than new ones, or may have been re-encoded multiple times. A more tech-savvy user is more likely to encode their pictures properly, while a user who is less knowledgeable might upload an image that has artifacts. Similarly, some users will upload images that are out of focus or poorly-lit.
- randcraw 6y agoI wonder if the study accurately reflects the lack of political common ground in the population. Are only 28% of us “moderates”? It’d be interesting to do the same analysis with photos of people taken 10, 20, 30, 40,... 100 years ago to see if the intersection (28%) grows/shrinks historically. Were we always so easily politically separable by our appearance alone? Has our appearance always revealed our political leanings, or do we now dress in order to make a political statement?
- crazygringo 6y agoThere's no definitive definition of "moderate". People who want to argue most people are moderate say the political middle is the 75% middle of the bell curve, while people who want to argue most people are partisan say the political middle is only the middle 20% of the bell curve. What is accurate to say is that political views in Congress have bifurcated (not a bell curve), and that people in America have "sorted" -- decades ago many conservatives were Democrats and many liberals were Republicans, but now Republicans are virtually all conservative and Democrats are virtually all liberal. And people's political identities have become more important to them. But it also continues to be accurate that when people are surveyed according to their actual political positions on issues (as opposed to party affiliation), political views of citizens are still strongly bell-shaped -- they cluster in the middle. (Contrasted with congresspeople who cluster at two peaks.)
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> of the bell curve There is no bell curve. Political orientation is largely a self-referencing phenomenon. Outside the political elite, who have a high degree of ideological coherence, knowing a person's views on one issue is a loose predictor on their views on another. Gun-toting anti-abortion lesbians and pro-immigration free-market feminists are real, and they aren't some striking minority.
- crazygringo 6y agoThere's a bell curve on each issue independently. This has been well established by surveys. And therefore however you want to aggregate issues into an axis, you'll invariably find the political distribution to be normal. It doesn't have anything to do with how coherent or not you find each party's platform to be. So yes, it is fair to say that political views are bell curve-shaped. It's not an artifact of political parties.
- EricE 6y agoSigh - modern day phrenology, but wrapped in AI. Just what we need :p
- jrd259 6y agoSo now I want to know 1. what is the eigenface for each of the two clusters? What does the perfect liberal look like? 2. What is the political orientation of https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
- inglor_cz 6y agoI wonder how much data about a person can you squeeze out of a high-definition video, analyzing not only face, but grimaces, tone of voice, rhythm of speech etc. That should give you a lot more hints than a still image. The worst possible uses: filtering out undesirable people applying for jobs or for college, firing people who are suspect of belonging to a different political tribe.
- marstall 6y agotheory: seeing as these are pictures that were very specifically "taken" in a given context - with a camera, by someone, for something (dating, facebook, etc.), would it be possible that the algorithm is picking up differences more in how people relate to those conditions, vs facial morphology? For example in the example photo, i would have also guessed that the model was a liberal. But I think it was more about the something in the WAY she was smiling and posing for the camera, and i guess also her specific grooming - hair and makeup.
- cwkoss 6y agoI wonder if accuracy for women is higher? I'd expect so, because women, via makeup, tend to have more cultural information encoded on their faces.
- corpMaverick 6y agoWho knew. Being a progressive/moderate makes people more attractive...and improves your sense of humor.
- bsaul 6y agoHas there been any attempt to do the same kind of work for IQ prediction ?
- throwitaway1235 6y agoThis study proves that the liberal surprise face meme is real.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- firebaze 6y agoReality please don't bite me. This will probably be an Oxymoron :) An interesting question, to me, is: how would you (personally) react if such an controversial and stigmatized factoid would be proven true at more than 5 sigma? Would you be shocked? Or would you accept the outcome? And which of both would tell what of yourself?
- NoOneNew 6y agoOh cool, are we going to bring back phrenology as long as its an AI powered black box. Sounds wonderful. It's going to be impossible for any of this to be abused. I say we should give AI power to a select few people who can make sweeping decisions in everyone's life. Oo Oo can we bring back eugenics too? What's wrong with an AI powered method of selecting the best genes to continue the human race. Then we can sterilize the degenerates the almighty algorithm picks out. I swear to fuck. All this praise to repeat the sins of the 20th century all over again? But oh no, it's okay because it's done by "software engineers". That and you "atheists techies" are just as fanatically religious as jihadists. Instead of a deity, you worship silicon valley and algorithms. Of course tech companies can be trusted with our data. Theres nothing to fear from putting your life on social media if you have nothing to hide. A select few should have absolute say on what we are allowed to even consider "free speech". Tech companies aren't in it for profit, they're in it to save the world because they're the "educated elite". Just... why is this not being shot down? Are you that blind to where it's going to lead? Its literally the same steps every other totialirian psychopath took. Mass identification on bullshit pseudoscience. Then comes the extermination.
- cwkoss 6y agoEvil plan: release this model as an app, heavily branded to skew usage towards my political enemies, and suggest it to be used to find "<opposite side> infiltrators in your midst". Accuracy issues are a feature not a bug! Now you've sown a bunch of discontent and suspicion within their communities.
- nerpderp82 6y agoIs it also 72% accurate for income level? I think the incomes of people on the right skew lower, or they have fashions for makeup, facial hair etc. I'd be interested in an adversarial attack on the classifier.
- IndySun 6y agoThe predicted 'answer' for the vast majority of people is going to be, basically, left or right (politically speaking), for maybe 80 or even 90% and more people, a 50/50 choice. How far does the 72% drop for correctly predicting the smaller political factions, I wonder?
- patwolf 6y agoAt some point in grade school I was home sick for a few days and ended up watching C-SPAN for several hours on end. I don't recall exactly what was going on politically during that time, but many congresspersons were standing up and giving speeches for a few minutes at a time. I eventually started a game in my mind where I'd try to guess their political affiliation before the chyron appeared. I'm pretty sure by the end I was getting it correct more than 50% of the time. Everyone was dressed similarly, but I remember looking closely at their tie patterns and hair cuts as clues.
- joncp 6y agoUpvoted for your use of chyron
- xnx 6y agoIsn't it possible in many ML models to then synthesize of the images of the features that most strongly predict the orientation? Like an archetypical "conservative" or "liberal". Could this help identify if the model is picking up on something like facial expression, or facial hair?
- karmasimida 6y agoIs this surprising? We all know there is a demographics/ethnics factor in people's political affiliation.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoA data point suggesting bias is more accurate than a coin flip...
- lucas_membrane 6y agoThat headline is a bit misleading. The facial recognition has to see two faces known to have different political orientations in order to deduce which face is which. The 72% classification correctness is about what one would expect if only 25% of persons had visible features that identified their political orientation and the other 75% were completely inscrutable.
- ml_hardware 6y agoHaven't seen this mentioned yet, but ResNet-50 is an old model. I would probably expect multiple-percentage-point gains from using a better (or honestly just larger) architecture and better training methodology. Throw an ML engineer at this task and you could probably do * way * better than 72%.
- sethc2 6y agoAnd I always thought it was funny how in classic books from authors like Jane Austen they’d always talk about a person’s physiognomy, and how you could draw strong conclusions about them from it. Maybe it wasn’t so bogus after all?
- anigbrowl 6y agoI think there's quite likely something to that. I seem to have better-than-average intuition in this area and it's handy, but not reliable enough that I'm willing to build causal explanations on it. Sadly, uncritical application of physiognomy has led to many bad outcomes involving discrimination or institutionalization, and the ideas are often used to prop up racism or other sorts of prejudice, so it's not much different from pseudosciences like phrenology or palm reading. Consider too that in Austen's time manual labor was much more common and social/job mobility much lower, so there were a lot of subtle clues that could be picked up from someone's appearance. Think how many folk tales center on someone's ability (or not) to cross social boundaries by modifying their appearance.
- btbuildem 6y agoThey claim facial morphology was one of the predictors. Pretty wild if true, but how does genetics / heredity play into political leanings?
- jhoechtl 6y agoThis is a fascinating result. On the other hand it is also telling .. and maybe dangerous? If we can predict political orientation, can we predict if someone is gay? If he is jewish? What comes next? Would't this legitimate all these voices who ever said I can tell you by just looking?
- Applejinx 6y agoAs someone who's studied facial expression in cartooning and tried to track down how that's done through face muscles, this tracks. Not only that, it is hackable, and somewhat mutable… and I think that can reflect back into one's general attitude on life. I'm going to share some personal notes on my own face hacking done to serve my purposes as a youtuber and open source coder… The key phrase here is, "The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust." People will respond to you based on what your face is doing, and be more or less favorably disposed to you if you 'match' where they're at. Guy Kawasaki's on record as trying to maximize his ability to Duchenne smile (crinkle the outside edges of the eyes as your cheeks go up) in order to better influence others. You can make special efforts to dry your skin there, the better to form heavy wrinkles that can come into play, signalling affability and well-disposedness as a proper Duchenne smile would do. But there's another area. If you fret a lot, or glower, your brow comes down and wrinkles form where your brow meets your nose. This signals suspicion, disgust, hostility. My face-hacking involves putting Nivea cream there and on my forehead, keeping that skin more flexible and mobile, for a more open affable look. But if you're targeting a conservative audience you can do the opposite: look at Tucker Carlson sometime. You can cultivate a world-weary scowl and it will increase your trust with people sharing a similar facial expression, and tend to concentrate your viewer's expressions into ones similar to your own (while you tell them scowl-worthy things), so long as you have their basic trust to start with. This is all very malleable. Very hackable. You can do it on purpose. I don't know if Tucker Carlson does scowl exercises, but I know if he botoxed his brow scrunch, he would be less effective as a political commentator, because he would be telegraphing the intended reaction to his information more weakly. We're looking at a general connection between human resting facial expression, and human overall outlook on life. I didn't expect to run across this study but I find it absolutely plausible. Almost axiomatic. You can even frame it in ways that appear to favor one political side or the other, but the underlying principle tells us a lot about how political orientations arise.
- nkurz 6y agoIt seems strange to me that the authors of paper seem to have made no attempt to determine which factors the model is using to differentiate between images. Or even to ask the human comparisons how they obtained their greater than chance results. Instead, both the humans and the computer model seem to be considered to be considered perfect "black boxes", which give entirely inscrutable answers. It's not that it's always trivial to figure out what's happening inside a model like this, but I'm surprised that no attempt seems to have been made: modifying images and seeing which increases the scores, bringing in a co-author who actually understands what the model is doing, seeing if they can obtain similar results with a more interpretable model. Am I wrong, and in fact fining out what's actually happening is impossible, or of no benefit?
- austincheney 6y ago> Had the political orientation estimates been more precise (i.e., had less error), the accuracy of the face-based algorithm could have been higher. That is an extremely loose assumption.
- bolangi 6y agoSo basically not at all.
- throw7 6y agoThis is hilarious study. This is like Zuckerberg calling us dumbfucks.
- pvaldes 6y agoToo much close to a Phrenology 2.0 IMAO
- jmpman 6y agoIs the model available? Would be interesting to see how it classifies members of Congress, governors, state legislators, etc. Assuming politicians weren’t used for the training set? (Also assuming Kanye wasn’t either?)