Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"This is the creation of four academics at elite institutions – however, their discipline isn't genetics. They're business school professors. They got a bunch of MBAs' self-assessed results on surveys of "Big 5 personality types" – itself a kind of astrological exercise with barely more rigor than, say, Meyers-Briggs – and then fed these results, along with the subjects' Linkedin profile photos and self-reported salaries and titles to an ML and produced – voila! – a machine that tells you whether you'll be a good manager based on your face!</p><p>This is an objectively very funny exercise, like AI Gaydar for middle-managers. They resort to some hilarious obfuscation:<br>(...)<br>In other words, we created a new random-number generator that is as bad at predicting your life-chances as the SATs or your GPA, two extremely bad ways of predicting your life chances – except to the extent that both numbers can be inflated if you start with a bunch of money and hire elite test-prep consultants. Good thing personal appearance has no correlates with wealth and there's no way to spend money to look more like a member of the elite? Naw, it must be the genetics underpinning the relationships between your "craniofacial features and behavior."</p><p>It's easy to see why AI is so tempting to people who want to incinerate any qualitative factors in a complex societal problem, transforming them into dubious quantitative residue that an algorithm can do math on:"</p><p><a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/cal</span><span class="invisible">iper-ai/#racism-machine</span></a> </p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Racism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Eugenics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Eugenics</span></a></p>