What does your "duck face" say about your personality?
And more importantly, what could a selfie analysis of a potential new hire some day reveal for your HR team?
It could be a lot, according to a new artificial intelligence network.
How well can AI guess your personality from a selfie?
A neural network from the Higher School of Economics University and Open University in Moscow reveals how well AI can predict what you are like based on pictures of you.
Face it, you take selfies. Everyone does, right?
This is especially true of the volunteers involved in the scientific study, "Assessing the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images."
The 12,000 people involved took a combined total of 31,000 selfies.
The researchers uploaded the images and trained an artificial intelligence neural network to predict the personalities of the participants.
The researchers focused on what they call the "Big Five" personality traits:
1. Openness to experience
2. Conscientiousness
3. Extroversion
4. Agreeableness
5. Neuroticism
And how did the AI perform? According to the study, the results are encouraging but need some work:
"While accurate, the precision of their AI leaves something to be desired. They found that their AI 'can can make a correct guess about the relative standing of two randomly chosen individuals on a personality dimension in 58% of cases.'"
But the most impressive part comes when the researchers compare the AI to humans:
"While rating personality traits by human 'close relatives or colleagues' was far more accurate than when rated by strangers, they found that the AI 'outperforms an average human rater who meets the target in person without any prior acquaintance,' according to the paper."
According to the researchers, this data should be taken with a grain of salt while they continue to improve it.
In the meantime, you might want to cut back on selfies, or someday AI might be judging you because of them.
Check out the full study here.
