Affect Recognition: Face Scanning Combined with Insane Pseudoscience
December 14th, 2018You’ll love this one.
Via: The Intercept:
Facial recognition has quickly shifted from techno-novelty to fact of life for many, with millions around the world at least willing to put up with their faces scanned by software at the airport, their iPhones, or Facebook’s server farms. But researchers at New York University’s AI Now Institute have issued a strong warning against not only ubiquitous facial recognition, but its more sinister cousin: so-called affect recognition, technology that claims it can find hidden meaning in the shape of your nose, the contours of your mouth, and the way you smile. If that sounds like something dredged up from the 19th century, that’s because it sort of is.
AI Now’s 2018 report is a 56-page record of how “artificial intelligence” — an umbrella term that includes a myriad of both scientific attempts to simulate human judgment and marketing nonsense — continues to spread without oversight, regulation, or meaningful ethical scrutiny. The report covers a wide expanse of uses and abuses, including instances of racial discrimination, police surveillance, and how trade secrecy laws can hide biased code from an AI-surveilled public. But AI Now, which was established last year to grapple with the social implications of artificial intelligence, expresses in the document particular dread over affect recognition, “a subclass of facial recognition that claims to detect things such as personality, inner feelings, mental health, and ‘worker engagement’ based on images or video of faces.” The thought of your boss watching you through a camera that uses machine learning to constantly assess your mental state is bad enough, while the prospect of police using “affect recognition” to deduce your future criminality based on “micro-expressions” is exponentially worse.
yMacbeth, Act 1, Scene 4:
“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”
Nice one Dennis. Reading that article is like diving into an icy lake. One thing I take issue with in the article is the conflation of affect/emotion recognition with physiognomy. While I’m sure the latter has some validity, the former is the prize for the psychopaths salivating to use AI against the other 99.99% of us.
From Wikipedia:
Leonardo da Vinci dismissed physiognomy in the early 16th century as “false”, a chimera with “no scientific foundation”.[10] Nevertheless, Leonardo believed that lines caused by facial expressions could indicate personality traits. For example, he wrote that “those who have deep and noticeable lines between the eyebrows are irascible”
The wonders of multimodal affect recognition:
https://www.intechopen.com/books/emotion-and-attention-recognition-based-on-biological-signals-and-images/multimodal-affect-recognition-current-approaches-and-challenges