Stanford professor predicts futuristic face scans will be able to determine your political beliefs

(Image credit: iStock)

published 12 September 2017

Could a quick face scan by artificial intelligence (AI) someday be able to determine whether you're liberal or conservative? Stanford University professor Michal Kosinski claims that AI will eventually be able to guess exactly that — and more.

Based off of just photos of people's faces, Kosinski told The Guardian that a computer program will be able to tell "whether they have high IQs, whether they are predisposed to criminal behavior, whether they have specific personality traits and many other private, personal details." "The face is an observable proxy for a wide range of factors, like your life history, your development factors, whether you're healthy," he said.

Kosinski was behind the controversial study published last week claiming that AI can guess a person's sexual orientation based off a photo of his or her face. While the AI was highly accurate in determining sexuality — it corrrectly identified sexual orientation in 91 percent of men — it wasn't always right, raising a slew of concerns and sparking controvesy with LGBTQ advocacy groups. GLAAD Chief Digital Officer Jim Halloran argued that "technology cannot identify someone's sexual orientation," and suggested that what the scientists' technology had actually recognized was "a pattern that found a small subset of out white gay and lesbian people on dating sites who look similar."