NIX Solutions reports: AI Will Be Able to Tell about You by Selfie

A group of researchers from the University of the Higher School of Economics and the Open University of Humanities and Economics demonstrated the ability of artificial intelligence to determine a person’s personality type by selfie,  states PopMech.

Researchers suggest that this technology can be used to select people in online dating services or to help companies sell products that are tailored to customer needs.

In the course of the work, 12,000 volunteers filled out a questionnaire, which scientists subsequently used to create a database of personal qualities. In addition to this, participants also took about 31,000 selfies. Photos were taken under controlled conditions with a neutral facial expression, with good lighting and with no makeup or jewelry.

The questionnaire itself was based on the psychological test of the Big Five, says NIX Solutions. Researchers often use this test to describe subjects’ personality, including openness to experience, integrity, extraversion, pleasantness, and neuroticism.

After training a neural network based on a dataset, the researchers found that it could predict personality traits from real photographs.

However, the accuracy of AI still leaves much to be desired. Scientists have noticed that the algorithm made the right conclusion in only 60% of cases. However, even with such indicators, artificial intelligence copes with this task better than humans. Assessment of a person’s personal qualities by strangers was less accurate than AI.