In a groundbreaking study that raises significant privacy concerns, researchers have disclosed that facial recognition technologies have the unsettling ability to predict an individual’s political orientation from merely analyzing images of their expressionless faces.
Published in the prominent journal American Psychologist, the study reveals that an AI algorithm can accurately infer a person’s political beliefs, a feat compared to the predictability of job interview outcomes on job success or the correlation between alcohol consumption and aggressiveness.
Michal Kosinski, the lead author of the study and a voice in the dialogue with Fox News Digital, said the experiment involved 591 participants. The individuals were first asked to complete a questionnaire regarding their political orientations.
Following that, an AI mechanism captured what Mr. Kosinski referred to as a numerical “fingerprint” from images of the participants’ faces. This data was then mapped against a database containing their survey responses, effectively predicting their political views.
“I think that people don’t realize how much they expose by simply putting a picture out there,” said Mr. Kosinski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
“We know that people’s sexual orientation, political orientation, religious views should be protected,” he said. “It used to be different. In the past, you could enter anybody’s Facebook account and see, for example, their political views, the likes, the pages they follow. But many years ago, Facebook closed this because it was clear for policymakers and Facebook and journalists that it is just not acceptable. It’s too dangerous.”
“But you can still go to Facebook and see anybody’s picture. This person never met you, they never allowed you to look at a picture, they would never share their political orientation … and yet, Facebook shows you their picture, and what our study shows is that this is essentially to some extent the equivalent to just telling you what their political orientation is,” Mr. Kosinski said.
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