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AI Can Tell Your Political Affiliation Just by Looking at Your Face

Gizmodo: “A study recently published in the peer-reviewed American Psychologist journal claims that a combination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology can accurately assess a person’s political orientation by simply looking at that person’s blank, expressionless face. The study was authored by researchers at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Researchers write that, prior to the experiment, they had 591 participants answer a political questionnaire that provided insights into their political beliefs. Those same participants were then scanned by researchers’ AI algorithm, which attempted to assess where they fell on the political spectrum. The algorithm could generally tell what a person’s political orientation was with a high degree of accuracy, even when that person’s identity was “decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity,” researchers write. The “algorithm’s predictive accuracy was even higher” when it had access to “participants’ age, gender, and ethnicity,” researchers write. The levels of accuracy were broken down in different situations and expressed in formulas, but the researchers summarized it as being “on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness.”

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