Speaking as an urban Republican, I’d say we’re generally a paranoid bunch. For example, here in Chicago there are roughly 300 of us, none of whom are permitted to speak to anyone save their immediate “handler,” and who are always addressed exclusively by code name for internal-security reasons. We’re typically victims of the Democratic machine, but then five years ago, for a few disorienting and terrifying weeks, suddenly Chicago became MAGA Country, leaving sensible conservatives feeling once again shot by both sides. So even though it’s been a bad enough week of news so far for those of us right-wingers who live in the belly of the Blue Beast, Fox News has now put us on notice that it’s about to get worse: Our first-ever official video appearance in politics may be as an extra in a real-life remake of Minority Report. For apparently AI has now figured out how to identify conservatives by facial feature recognition alone.
Researchers are warning that facial recognition technologies are “more threatening than previously thought” and pose “serious challenges to privacy” after a study found that artificial intelligence can be successful in predicting a person’s political orientation based on images of expressionless faces.
A recent study published in the journal American Psychologist says an algorithm’s ability to accurately guess one’s political views is “on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness.” Lead author Michal Kosinski told Fox News Digital that 591 participants filled out a political orientation questionnaire before the AI captured what he described as a numerical “fingerprint” of their faces and compared them to a database of their responses to predict their views.
“I think that people don’t realize how much they expose by simply putting a picture out there,” said Kosinski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
A wiser man would analyze this alarmingly hyped claim — that facial-recognition software will be used to filter out the obvious right-wing agents provocateurs from protest gatherings, jury pools, or the wait staff of Bohemian Grove — more closely. A more skeptical man would evince reservations about the likelihood of our coming cataloguing by visual image in a database of Known Wrongthinkers. It all seems rather overblown, some would say.
I prefer to panic wildly and overreact irresponsibly instead. I’m tired of always being the reasonable one around here, dammit. I want to invoke feverish nightmare visions of Woke SkyNet hunting down the last of us in our underground bunkers, as we are infiltrated by shotgun-wielding robots disguised in the skinsuits of online right-wing influencers. And as I look in the mirror and ponder the eventual end of all human liberty due to woke AI, I curse the ruination that my decayed, irrevocably reactionary features will have brought upon me. Folks, have you seen my author image? I might as well be the test picture they farmed to the AI and taught to label as “smug right-wing prat.” I literally look like the Worst Person You Know Who Just Made a Great Point, but this time with hair. Some people get used to living life with a target on their backs; I’ve got one plastered all over my bent-nosed mug. The Germans have a word for it, Backpfeifengesicht: the face that begs for a fist.
Mama always told me this would happen, and I never listened because I thought it was just one of those things moms say to their kids like “Stop drinking all of my booze.” But she was right: I made a face like this, and it pretty much stuck that way. In my defense: Try to grow up in Potomac, Md., as a conservative kid and not end up a bit sour-faced and haggard. For the study, researchers apparently went by “neutral” or “blank” facial expressions to judge conservativeness, and my “blank” expression conveys an emotional valence ranging from “bemused indifference” to “boundless contempt” with little else in between.
So forget about research; I’m in a foul mood anyway, as befits my purportedly identifiable conservative mien, and just assume the future is somewhere around the corner. (Whether one’s inner thoughts can truly be divined from one’s outer facial expression is, you will notice, a matter I didn’t even bother to address.) I suppose what Orwell said is true, that “at age 50, everyone has the face he deserves” — it certainly applies to me, and I’m only 43 — but I didn’t expect the judgment to be made by Google Gemini or its ilk. Having gotten used to the idea that the primary burden I carry around with my face is a deluxe set of luggage underneath my eye sockets and a wildly deviated septum, I thought I’d escaped the worst of it. It would be a shame to one day wake to find out that a computer can find out what every other person who has ever encountered me can usually suss within three minutes, but by then I’ll have already gone survivalist in the Tamaulipas province of Mexico like Sarah Connor. No fate but what we make!
Source: AI Can Spot Conservatives with Facial Recognition Technology?
