Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2016, AI researchers Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang posted a paper to a non-peer reviewed depository that explained their plan to use machine learning to recognize criminals just by looking at their faces. They claimed to discover that “some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality have been found by machine learning.” There was an immediate backlash. According to Wu and Zhang, critics called the project racist. The researchers defended their stance, admitting that some of the language they used did have negative connotations due to oversights in translating their research into English, but overall standing by the project. This case study examines the ethics of their research. The analysis provided by the author argues that the kind of research under discussion in this case study is not ethical to carry out.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.120 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".