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Record W4416214913 · doi:10.1109/mts.2025.3627873

Why Do People Trust Physiognomic AI?

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

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.484
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.003
Science and technology studies0.0030.004
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0030.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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