Artificial Intelligence is taking the country by storm.
Political experts are already enjoying the benefits of AI’s deep data analysis to make their daily jobs easier.
And now Artificial Intelligence just found evidence linking this characteristic to conservatives.
AI correctly predicts political ideology from photographs 60% of the time
Researchers in Denmark are training Artificial Intelligence to study photos of politicians to identify the political affiliation of other people with similar characteristics. The results shocked the researchers when they found that it was “able to predict the ideology” with nearly 60 percent accuracy.
They used “a pre-developed and readily available network that was trained and validated exclusively on publicly available data.” Analyzing facial expressions and other physical characteristics, like masculinity and beauty, the AI would compare the photos against those of politicians to get their results.
They said that they removed any background imagery, symbols, and controlled for national origin to stop the AI from using context to make the decision. They warned that the accuracy of their project “confirmed the threat to privacy posed by deep learning approaches.”
They also found one surprising characteristic that the program associated with conservatives.
“Right-wing faces” have a tendency to “be perceived as more attractive”
Conservatives tend to think that technology is biased against them, but in this case the data points in the other direction. The researchers found that the computer program determined that “the right-wing faces, particularly for females, might be perceived as more attractive.”
The AI generated scores based on attractiveness, and the people on the conservative end of the spectrum scored higher in this category. They said “model-predicted ideology connects independently classifiable features of the face.”
Researchers added that “for females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as conservative.” They said that the results were “credible” because prior research has found the same “link between attractiveness and conservatism.”
They also gave what they believe to be the explanation for this correlation.
The more “beautiful” and “successful” people are, the more likely they are to be conservative
“Attractiveness was not the only correlate of model-predicted ideology,” they wrote, adding that they “also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders.” They said that people on the Left side of the political spectrum appeared more neutral.
Other studies have found similar results when comparing conservative politicians versus left-wing politicians. “The Right Look” was a study completed in 2017 that found “beautiful people earn more, which makes them less inclined to support redistribution” of wealth.
That study reported that the “psychological explanation could be that good-looking people are more likely to perceive the world as a just place, since they are treated better than others, achieve higher status, and are happier.” The same study said that the general tendency of the Left is to view the world as “unfair.”
They argued that “greater self-reported attractiveness is negatively related to a preference for egalitarianism, typically associated with the Left.” They added that “the more beautiful people consider themselves, the less they are in favor of redistribution.”
Patriot Political will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
