Facial recognition technology has been around for quite a while now.
Over the years, it has gotten a lot better as well. Today it is commonly used to unlock your phone, make secure purchases, and by law enforcement to track people in public areas.
According to several studies, however, facial recognition software, especially when combined with artificial intelligence (AI) software, can do a lot more than that, and it is a little scary.
Michael Kosinski, a Stanford University psychologist, conducted an interview with Business Insider where he claims that the latest developments in facial scanning software can accurately predict your political beliefs, your intelligence, and even some very personal desires that you may want kept private.
In a 2021 study he published, he showed that the facial recognition model he was using was able to predict a person’s political positions with 72% accuracy.
This was simply from feeding a photograph into the system.
Humans, according to the study, could only predict it with 55% accuracy, which is barely over random chance.
In the study he warns that while this technology is very impressive, people need to be careful with what it can do. He explained:
“Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.”
With people’s opinions on just about every subject imaginable being very polarizing today, it is easy to see how this type of technology could be used negatively.
Governments or companies could scan people to determine their sexual orientation, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and much more.
As of now, the systems Kosinski reported on are not 100% accurate, but they are significantly better than chance.
In some situations, that would be enough for an oppressive government to take action or at least perform additional investigations on the person in question.
While the cat is out of the bag when it comes to both facial recognition and artificial intelligence, it is important to be aware of these types of possibilities so they won’t be used against people in the future.
Facial recognition and AI software is getting scary.
If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.