This EU-funded AI rates how hideous your face is — for society’s sake
The system also guesses your age, BMI, life expectancy, and gender
AI creep continues
The next algorithm judges your age.Schep says companies use these tools to learn more about shoppers, or to guess if someone’s lying about their age on dating sites.Again, the system proved simple to deceive: I knocked a decade off my age just by giving my head a shake.
The website goes on to infer my gender, another calculation that can vary depending on where the algorithm was developed. It then predicts your BMI, using the only algorithm Schep trained himself, which he did by feeding it a diet of 50% Chinese celebrities and 50% American arrest records. This estimate is madeby measuring proportions of your face, such as the space above your eyes, so raising your eyebrows can lead your BMI to plummet.
The one consistent result I got was a ludicrously optimistic life expectancy of 81. Clearly, thealgorithm can’t see my lungs and liver. But insurance agencies still use similar models to price their policies as they’re seen as better than nothing.
Finally, the system showed me my “face print,” a digital identifier that the likes of lovable Clearview AI use to match your photo to a vast repository of images.
Schep then revealed the truth about those dogs: they were used to guess my emotional state by analyzing my facial expressions as I watched them — another way in which AI can make some seriously personal inferences.
“As face recognition technology moves into our daily lives, it can create this subtle but pervasive feeling of being watched and judged all the time,” said Schep. “You might feel more pressure to behave ‘normally’, which for an algorithm means being more average. That’s why we have to protect our human right to privacy, which is essentially our right to be different. You could say that privacy is a right to be imperfect.”
Using these tools can seem convenient and useful in the short-term. But are the long-term risks to us as individuals and a society worth the potential benefits?
I don’t think so. Now, excuse me while I update my dating profile pictures.
Update October 7 6PM CET:The original version of this article implied that HireVue uses voices, facial expressions, and vocabulary to analyze a job candidate’s emotional state. HireVue has confirmed that this is not something the company does.We have corrected the article to reflect this, and regret the error.
Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is a senior reporter at TNW. He covers European tech, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, and government policy.Thomas is a senior reporter at TNW. He covers European tech, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, and government policy.
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