I’ve got to pull the alarm on this one. This is a huge liability to objectify and promulgate prejudice. It’s literally teaching people to associate good or bad distinctions with specific faces or facial features. How is that not objectifying? I think this should be treated highly suspiciously and probably not done at all.
Edit-I see people may take this as a joke. Sorry, not funny. Especially not right now.
You have to be joking. This is obviously one programmer's experiment on some esoteric data visualization mode that nobody ever used. The author even says in a footnote that:
> "One of my favorite¹ concepts for multi-dimensional data visualization is the Chernoff Face"
> 1: "Favorite" might be code for "useless," going with the theme of this blog"
Don't act like this project will have actual real world uses and ramifications. No, it won't literally teach people to associate good or bad qualities with facial features, because nobody will ever use it for practical purposes. No, there's no liability to promote prejudice, this is just some programmers ML side-project.
> How is that not objectifying?
It literally is. The generated faces are mathematical objects. They're not real people.
So? That just means that two variables are closely related. You have to be very blind and ignorant to take the implication that white people are less happy, or something. Is it racist to take a photo of a sad white person?
Your comment is pretty alarmist, but I don't find the probability of this article (or Chernoff faces in general) having a negative impact on racial relations very high. Maybe you can convince me otherwise, but I think it's just an interesting, if not very useful, way to display data. I'll leave it up to you to come up with a compelling (plausible) scenario in which this negatively impacts anyone.
It is using that we are used to look at faces as a way to display multi variate categorical variables. Not all of such dimensions are bad/good dichotomies. Deeming a visualization technique as evil because it can be used to poor taste may seem clever, but ultimately will leave us with no visualization techniques left.
Right now what? Sounds like you're jumping at shadows. In general false positives are good for finding errors in systems. However, they can go too far and lead to pathological patterns like human immune system self-alergies.
Edit-I see people may take this as a joke. Sorry, not funny. Especially not right now.