Scientists Create "Deliberately" Biased AI That Judges You as Brutally as Your Mother-in-Law

Machine learning researchers are teaching neural networks how to superficially judge humans -- and the results are as brutal as they are familiar. A study about the judgmental AI, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, describes how researchers trained the model how to judge attributes in human faces, the way we do upon first meeting each other, and how they trained it to manipulate photos to evoke different judgments, such as appearing "trustworthy" or "dominant." "Our dataset not only contains bias," Princeton computer science postdoctoral researcher Joshua Peterson wrote in a tweet thread about the research, "it deliberately reflects it." We collected over 1 million human judgments to power a model that can both predict and manipulate first impressions of diverse and naturalistic faces! The PNAS paper notes that the AI so mirrored human judgment that it tended to associate objective physical characteristics, such as someone's size or skin color, with attributes ranging from trustworthiness to privilege.