Scientists Say Their AI System Can Scan Your Face to Detect Whether a Company Should Hire You

"To do it, the researchers used an AI system trained on previous scholarship about face-based personality detection to extract five personality traits - the "soft skills" of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - from the headshots of 96,000 MBA graduates collected from LinkedIn. Then they checked how the LinkedIn members' careers had actually turned out, and claim they found an association between the traits they identified from the facial scans and their success in the labor market."

"The implication, they say, is that machine learning techniques can find correlations between facial characteristics and real-world success. Extraversion, for example, is the "strongest positive predictor" of compensation, while openness indicates a person is unlikely to be paid well. It's a pretty horrifying thought - an algorithm that chooses whether you get the job, secure the bank loan, or rent the car based on your face alone."

An AI system trained on face-based personality detection extracted five traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—from headshots of 96,000 MBA graduates collected from LinkedIn. The extracted traits were correlated with the graduates' actual career outcomes and compensation. Extraversion emerged as the strongest positive predictor of pay, while openness associated with lower pay. The analysis implies that machine learning can find correlations between facial characteristics and labor-market success. Such capability creates incentives for corporations to deploy facial profiling in hiring, lending, and rental decisions and raises serious ethical and discrimination concerns.

Read at Futurism