If you thought your credit score was invasive, just wait until companies are judging you based on your mug alone.
A new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, flagged by The Economist, sought to answer the question: can AI detect trustworthy people just by analyzing their facial characteristics?
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would ask such a question, but here we are anyway. The research built on some other ethically dubious scholarship, which posits that personality traits can be sussed out just based on a person’s facial features.
Setting aside that highly problematic can of worms, the team at UPenn argues that yes, as a matter of fact, AI can accurately predict important characteristics about people based on an AI analysis of their face — including metrics linked to financial success, like respectfulness and trust.
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. But as The Economist points out, in our world where financial success takes priority over all else, corporations would have a “strong incentive” to deploy it. That is, of course, assuming they don’t discriminate on grounds of protected characteristics.
However, even that isn’t much of a barrier in 2025, as versions of this are already bearing fruit in the real world.
In the US, some states are using AI software to verify drivers licenses, with disastrous results for those living with facial differences. In the UK, the Met Police just announced they secured a record number of arrests with their AI facial-detection system, with “only” a 0.5 percent false-positive rate (which, if you think about it, is really bad.)
As the UPenn researchers write, “widespread adoption of facial recognition technology in the future may motivate individuals to modify their facial images using software or even alter their actual appearance through cosmetic procedures.”
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