Conservative female politicians are likely to appear happier and more attractive in pictures than liberal politicos, a latest artificial intelligence study conducted in Denmark found.
Published within the Nature-owned journal Scientific Reports in March, the research found AI can predict an individual’s political ideology with 61% accuracy by analyzing only one headshot.
The scientists inputted about 3,200 publicly submitted photos of political candidates who ran within the 2017 Danish municipal election into Microsoft Azure’s Face API tool to evaluate the person’s emotional state.
The evaluation found 80% of the faces displayed a glad expression, while 19% read as neutral.
“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found amongst those the model identified as prone to be conservative,” read the findings. “These results are credible provided that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism.”
The outcomes were much more accurate for men, 65%, before the researchers stripped their photos of visual imagery aside from the person’s face — resembling shirt collars.
Left-leaning male politicians showed more neutral, less glad faces than their conservative counterparts, the study found.
“Attractiveness was not the one correlate of model-predicted ideology,” the scientists explained. “We also found that expressing happiness is related to conservatism for each genders.
“Previous work has found smiling in photographs to be a legitimate indicator of extraversion,” they continued. “And while extraversion just isn’t broadly related to ideology some studies have found that right-wing politicians are more extraverted.”
Scientists noted that “because attractiveness generally helps electoral success, all candidates are incentivized to supply a lovely photograph.”
“Politicians on the left and right can have different incentives for smiling — for instance, smiling faces have been found to look more attractive which is relatively necessary for conservative politicians,” the paper reads.
“Future work is required to explore the extent to which glad faces are indicative of conservatism outside of samples of politicians.”
Of greater concern is the “threat to privacy posed by deep learning approaches” using publicly available data.
This just isn’t the primary time AI has raised warning flags.
In March, Facebook removed AI-generated deepfake sexual social media ads that used the likenesses of actresses Scarlett Johansson and Emma Watson.
And a recent report found generative AI will cause significant disruption in jobs held by “higher-wage knowledge employees” whose roles were “previously considered to be relatively proof against automation.”
