"pretentious, pompous, arrogant, shallow, frivolous"
Is this talking about the researchers?
Chinese researchers claim to have taken facial recognition to the next level – by predicting the personality traits of women from their photos alone. Or rather, given the labels on the training data, predicting the personality traits young guys expect women to have from their looks alone. Undeterred by all the flak they …
Before being thumbed down, I merely point out it could work out if the person at a job interview was a bigoted dick, liable to be a source of future sexual harassment actions:
Naturalness is highlighted as a traditional aesthetic preference in Chinese culture, a societal beauty standard reflected in the results and choices made by the Chinese students.
The neural network only predicts how young Chinese men will judge a woman’s personality traits based on how much makeup she appears to wear
And how does this differ from today?
I have been coached by people once upon a time and I have coached people too on how to adjust their body language to improve their chances in an interview as well as what not to do.
Here is an example of what not to do. Legs are above chest level when seated and she is holding leg up in hand mid-interview. The only thing that screams "arrogant s/d of a b" more than that is to hold your arms/hands behind your head while talking.
Like it or not looks and body language are important. Though most of it usually not static stuff - you cannot judge stuff like that from a single picture, especially a passport style mugshot. In fact face alone is insufficient - you have to observe the person for a while to pick up things like this.
Interesting how you included a link to a picture of Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) - not only does she have an unapproachable pose but when combined with a moderate amount of research or recollection about Theranos one then projects defensive traits to this as well. Possibly because Theranos is a company built on lies, lies and more lies and therefore she's been forced to defend herself repeatedly.
The most obvious thing that struck me about the S- group is that the pictures were deliberately posed and shot to look dramatic and challenging. The same women wearing natural-looking makeup and posed demurely would probably have been put in S+. ISTM that if this "research" proves anything it's that young Chinese men find women they believe to be assertive threatening, and that they're daft and inexperienced enough to think they can infer personality from appearance.
Well, you can go on about all that, but I think you're right that it says more about the men. Every "woman" appears to be a teenager.
Outside of this, I wonder if they could create an app to do the same for a webpage. For instance...
www.facebook.com : Old_
www.google.com : Sneaky+
And is it just me, or do the S+ cohort look like they're 14-16 years old, and the S- cohort about 20-25? The S+ poses look literally more wide-eyed naive as well. The S- women seem older, more confident, and kinda like they're sizing you up.
Full disclosure: looking at the S+ girls makes me feel like a dirty old pedo, where the S- women are smoking hot. But then I'm not a young Chinese guy terrified by assertive women, as another poster said.
Who says it isn't though?
Convoluted, that is, given the warped world view of the operators and the resulting broken way the network processes imagery in order to estimate likelyhood of likeness to the eye of some Chinese nerds...
Mine's the one with the copy of "Bluff your way into AI" in the side pocket...
"You've proven that systems can reflect the biases of those who have a role in configuring or validating inputs into said system."
So it is "Machine Learning" then; they're just learning from idiots.
Unfortunately humans can sometimes learn from idiots by adopting an "I'm not going to be an idiot like that guy" mode whereas machines that are taught by idiots will be idiots...
Researcher_1: "I've run through with the new parameters, 999 were assigned to group 1 and only one was assigned to group 2"
Researcher_2: "What's the new parameters?"
Researcher_1: "Would they Talk to me"
Researcher_2: "Harsh, Still using your Mum's picture in the data set?"
Researcher_1: "Yes, but she wasn't the positive"
Researcher_2: "Who was?"
Researcher_1: "The head of HR"
Researcher_2: "Ooo, Looks like you've got mail. What does it say?"
Researcher_1: "Its from the head of HR, wants to see me in her office to explain why I've been photographing the campus females"
"...the idea of judging personality traits from physical attractiveness – a rather subjective measure – is objectionable and likely impossible."
My theory is that good looking people don't have to try as hard to make friends, so don't have to develop a nice personality. It may be an objectionable generalisation, subject to bias, and foolish to pre-judge people with, but I find it's usually right.
Whereas us uggies know all too well how conceited, backhanded and vile the ablist, nice-looking people with good teeth are, giving rise to a healthy level of cynicism and distrust, and an arguably justified hostile attitude towards people in general for being patronizing dicks to anyone who does not fit in a Benneton commercial. But that could just be the booze talking at this point.
The article starts with: "Chinese researchers claim to have taken facial recognition to the next level – by predicting the personality traits of women from their photos alone."
However, both the title of the paper and the extracts included in article do not support this assertion:
The title "Automated Inference on Sociopsychological Impressions of Attractive Female Faces" actually says what the paper is really about: an automated system that mimics what people do.
The extracts also support this:
"A non-acquaintance female face can be judged unanimously as being physically beautiful, and yet different observers may associate this face with approval or disapproval connotations, using labels (or stereotypes) like pure, sweet, endearing, innocent, cute, on one hand, or indifferent, pretentious, pompous, arrogant, shallow, frivolous, coquettish, on the other," the paper states.
"As these labels are loosely binary quantization of social attributes of trustworthiness, dominance, innocence, and introvert-extrovert, here is another case for the old, cross-culture belief that facial appearances are symptoms of innate traits and behavioral propensity."
Both extracts are referring to how people make an association between appearance and personality; nowhere are they claiming that these associations are correct.
It would have been an interesting story if hadn't been so badly misrepresented.
I think the S+ group equates to those who look like they'll screw on the first date, and the S- those who won't.
Amusing that the photos are all of women who are easy on the eye. Would have been a far better test if some of the photos had been of the "only with beer goggles" or "not even with your barge pole" variety.
An even better test would have been to get the Chinese students to try to assess faces they're not familiar with - a bunch of white women maybe, or black africans. To take it even further, it would be interesting to see how the effect of alcohol affects the judgement: make them reassess the same girls while drunk
I think the S+ group equates to those who look like they'll screw on the first date, and the S- those who won't.
I know I am extremely shallow but the S- group looks to me like the ones who might have personalities and be fun to be around and the S+ look like tagalongs. Perhaps this too says something about the attitude of the researchers, or perhaps it's just me.
"The researchers – Xiaolin Wu, Xi Zhang and Chang Liu, all from Shanghai Jiao Tong University – scoured Baidu’s search engine to collect 3,954 images of women"
I can think of a better word than "researcher" for this. But I don't need to mention it, as they are clearly the saddest, shalllowest, most pathetic dweebs imaginable. A truly intelligent system would add a caption to the pictures that said "Judge all you want, you'll never find a girlfriend you pathetic moron".