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Record W4416214913 · doi:10.1109/mts.2025.3627873

Why Do People Trust Physiognomic AI?

2025· article· W4416214913 on OpenAlexaff
Chris Gell, Peter R. Lewis

Bibliographic record

VenueIEEE Technology and Society Magazine · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicEthics and Social Impacts of AI
Canadian institutionsOntario Tech University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAntithesisField (mathematics)CognitionCore (optical fiber)Big dataOverconfidence effect

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this article, we examine the concerning trend of increasing physiognomic artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as those assessing an individual’s employability, criminality, and even sexual orientation, and attempt to understand why trust may be given to these systems despite their biased and baseless conclusions. While the practice of linking facial features to human characteristics should be rightfully rejected at its core due to the harmful prejudices and antithesis it poses to responsible AI development, this still has not stopped the recent influx of literature claiming to provide unbiased insights in this field of study. To understand this trend, we examine these claims through the lens of a trust model to hypothesize why such applications are gaining acceptance. After reviewing recent literature for common trends, it appears that these applications are gaining acceptance and trust under the guise of big data through the use of exceptionally large datasets, cognitive bias toward believing the output of mathematical frameworks, and data dredging to find relationships justifying their physiognomic hypothesis. As such, we show that when these factors are combined, each contributing toward various dispositions to trust, it unfortunately leads to situations where acceptance of their faulty results becomes a plausible reality, harming individuals affected by their outputs.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.042
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.051

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.042
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.015
Scholarly communication0.0070.008
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0030.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.308
Teacher spread0.298 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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