The “Criminality from Face” Illusion

Source: Kevin Bowyer, Michael C. King, Walter Scheirer, and Kushal Vangara

This academic paper has the following abstract:

The automatic analysis of face images can generate predictions about a person’s gender, age, race, facial expression, body mass index, and various other indices and conditions. A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person’s face in order to predict the person’s status as Criminal / Non-Criminal. Predicting “criminality from face” may initially seem similar to other facial analytics, but we argue that attempts to create a criminality-from-face algorithm are necessarily doomed to fail, that apparently promising experimental results in recent publications are an illusion resulting from inadequate experimental design, and that there is potentially a large social cost to belief in the criminality from face illusion.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence , Computer Science , Emotion Recognition , Facial Recognition , Physiognomy , Science Fiction , Tech Ethics