Here’s a decidedly creepy new application for artificial intelligence. The technology could be used to reject job candidates just by taking a look at them. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania trained an AI to scan people’s faces and guess their personality in just seconds. Personality is a common factor in determining how successful a person might be in a job.
The team fed their algorithm photos of nearly 96,000 MBA graduates and asked it to guess at their personality, then compared the results to the grads’ real-life career trajectories. And the guesses were accurate more often than not. It turns out that artificial intelligence can be very good at quickly spotting minute details in our faces that hint at our personalities.
Given the obvious legal and privacy concerns of such technology, the team behind it has pointed out that it was designed to be simply another tool in the toolbox that helps human beings make the ultimate decisions.
