The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"

Comments

• uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  I thought phrenology was still a science at the time of the German Reich, only made defunct later. Now I have my doubts.

  Social darwinism was disproven in the 1900s and supply-side economics died in the 19th century so it’s not like pseudoscience does not spring up like weeds when rich people want to sponsor it.

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    That’s the thing with science communication. It barely exists.

    There is a bogus theory. Nobody tries replicating it for decades because there’s no fame in replication. Then someone finally does and disproves the theory. If the author is lucky, it gets published on the last pages of some low-level journal, because there’s even less fame in failed replication. But the general public doesn’t read journals. They don’t even read science journalism. They might read a short note in a daily newspaper that was twisted into unrecognizability by an underpaid, overworked journalist who didn’t understand a word in the article they read in some pop science magazine.

    Science doesn’t reach the general public, and if it does against all odds, it’s so twisted and corrupted that it frequently says the opposite of what the original paper said.

    People do their general education in school, and once they leave they stop learning general topics.

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• leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  Me and my hammer would be happy to offer our retrophrenological services to any executives looking to improve their performance and personality (painkillers not included).

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• knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I remember when stuff like this was used to show how dystopian china is.

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• bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Wow. If a black box analysis of arbitrary facial characteristics is more meritocratic than the status quo, that speaks volumes about the nightmare hellscape shitshow of policy and procedure that resides behind the current set of ‘metrics’ being used.

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  • bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    All of that being typed, I’m aware that the ‘If’ in my initial response is doing the same amount of heavy lifting as the ‘Some might argue’ in the article. Barring the revelation of some truly extraordinary evidence, I don’t accept the premise.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The gamification of hiring is largely a result of businesses de-institutionalizing Human Resources. If you were hired on at a company like Exxon or IBM in the 1980s, there was an enormous professionalized team dedicated to sourcing prospective hires, vetting them, and negotiating their employment.

    Now, we’ve automated so much of the process and gutted so much of the actual professionalized vetting and onboarding that its a total crap shoot as to whom you’re getting. Applicants aren’t trying to impress a recruiter, they’re just aiming to win the keyword search lottery. Businesses aren’t looking to cultivate talent long term, just fill contract positions at below-contractor rates.

    So we get an influx of pseudo-science to substitute for what had been a real sociological science of hiring. People promising quick and easy answers to complex and difficult questions, on the premise that they can accelerate the churn of staff without driving up cost of doing business.

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    • bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Gotcha. This is replacing one nonsense black box with a different one, then. That makes a depressing kind of sense. No evidence needed, either!

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  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    A primary application of “AI” is providing blackboxes that enable the extremely privileged to wield arbitrary control with impunity.

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• entwine@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This fascist wave is really bringing out all the cockroaches in our society. It’s a good thing you can’t erase anything on the internet, as this type of evidence will probably be useful in the future.

  You’d better get in on a crypto grift, Kelly Shue of the Yale School of Management. I suspect you’ll have a hard time finding work within the next 1-3 years.

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  • 3abas@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They absolutely can erase things on the internet, are you archiving this for when the other archives die? Are you gonna be able to share it when the time comes? And will anyone care?

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    • valek879@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      I have some spare storage! What I want to do with it is either archive very important information, documents and/or scientific papers. I don’t mind of it’s the same shit others have, just want to be part of retaining information. I’m trans and last time fascists were in power we lost 100 years of progress towards being able to exist openly so I’m pretty eager to archive information.

      Either this or it’d be cool to be part of a decentralized database that is searchable and and readable.

      I could probably find somewhere between 1-10 TB to donate to the cause in perpetuity. But I don’t know how to do this myself, what to save, or if there are groups already doing this type of thing.

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• AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The study claims that they analyzed participants’ labor market outcomes, that being earnings and propensity to move jobs, “among other things.”

  Fun fact, did you know white men tend to get paid more than black men for the same job, with the same experience and education?

  Following that logic, if we took a dataset of both black and white men, then used their labor market outcomes to judge which one would be a good fit over another, white men would have higher earnings and be recommended for a job more than black people.

  Black workers are also more likely to switch jobs, one of the reasons likely being because you tend to experience higher salary growth when moving jobs every 2-3 years than when you stay with a given company, which is necessary if you’re already being paid lower wages than your white counterparts.

  By this study’s methodology, that person could be deemed “unreliable” because they often switch jobs, and would then not be considered.

  Essentially, this is a black box that gets to excuse management saying “fuck all black people, we only want to hire whites” while sounding all smart and fancy.

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  • shawn1122@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    The goal here is to go back to a world where such racial hieraechies are accepted but without human accountability. This way you are subjugated arbitrarily but hey the computer said so, so what can we do about it?

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• panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Racial profiling keeps getting reinvented.

  Fuck that.

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• psycotica0@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  "Imagine appearing for a job interview and, without saying a single word, being told that you are not getting the role because your face didn’t fit. You would assume discrimination, and might even contemplate litigation. But what if bias was not the reason?

  Uh… guys…

  Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of unfairly treating a person or group differently from other people or groups on a class or categorical basis

  Prejudice: an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge

  Bias: to give a settled and often prejudiced outlook to

  Judging someone’s ability without knowing them, based solely on their appearance, is, like, kinda the definition of bias, discrimination, and prejudice. I think their stupid angle is “it’s not unfair because what if this time it really worked though!” 😅

  I know this is the point, but there’s no way this could possibly end up with anything other than a lazily written, comically clichéd, Sci Fi future where there’s an underclass of like “class gammas” who have gamma face, and then the betas that blah blah. Whereas the alphas are the most perfect ughhhhh. It’s not even a huge leap; it’s fucking inevitable. That’s the outcome of this.

  I should watch Gattaca again…

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  • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Like every corporate entity, they’re trying to redefine what those words mean. See, it’s not “insufficient knowledge” if they’re using an AI powered facial recognition program to get an objective prediction, right? Right?

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  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I think their stupid angle is “it’s not unfair because what if this time it really worked though!”

    I think their angle is “its not unfair because the computer says it!”. automated bias. offloading liability to an AI.

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  • morriscox@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    People see me in cargo pants, polo shirt, a smartphone in my shirt pocket, and sometimes tech stuff in my (cargo) pants pockets and they assume that I am good at computers. I have an IT background and have been on the Internet since March of 1993 so they are correct. I call it the tech support uniform. However, people could dress similarly to try to fool people.

    People will find ways, maybe makeup and prosthetics or AI modifications, to try to fool this system. Maybe they will learn to fake emotions. This system is a tool, not a solution.

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    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

      TLDR as soon as you have a system like this people will game it…

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• basiclemmon98@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  Ooh yay, more ways for employer’s AI to autoreject people! How fun!

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• Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  “Some might argue that the authors of this article have their head so far up their own ass that they haven’t seen daylight in years”

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• verdi@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  FYI, it’s not a paper, it’s a blog post from well connected and presumably highly educated people benefiting from the institutional prestige to see tjmheir poorly conducted study be propagated ad eternum without a modicum of relevant peer review.

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• stickly@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Image

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  • DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Well, that sounds insane.

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• _cnt0@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Race theory 2.0 AI edition just dropped.

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• neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is just phrenology with extra steps

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    They barely even added extra steps.

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• AbidanYre@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Not April fool’s or the onion? What the fuck?

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  • tourist@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The Economist has a tendency to put out articles seemingly designed to make conservatives bust nuts through their trousers at mach 4

    Is Lucifer’s Poison Ivy destroying the fabric of civilization as we know it?

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• Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Woaw, we skipped right from diversity hiring to phrenology hiring without wasting a single beat. Boy has the modern world become efreceint.

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  • zartemie@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    At least high variance means the possibility of an opposite swing (this is cope)

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• ViatorOmnium@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Does it predict people that allegedly finished university not knowing the difference between correlation and causality?

  This reminds me of a fraud risk classification model I once heard about, which ended up being an excellent income-by-postal-code classifier.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It predicts people with business school degrees getting six, seven, and eight figure salaries to blow smoke up the asses of the investor pool.

    This reminds me of a fraud risk classification model I once heard about, which ended up being an excellent income-by-postal-code classifier.

    The dark art of sociology is recognizing how poverty impacts human behaviors and then calibrating your business to profit off it.

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    • pdxfed@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sociology is one of the few majors that Florida is trying to cut from public school programs. They apparently think it radicalizes people to educate them about the way the world works.

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• gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Last time did not end well for about 6 million people…

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• umbraroze@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Boeing CEO: “We’re always innovating, and sometimes we need to boldly embrace the wisdom of the past if it can be re-examined in light of current technology. From now on, our airplane navigation systems will be based on the Flat Earth model. This makes navigation so much more computationally efficient, guys.”

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  • Reverendender@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    So, the US Supreme Court model then.

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• oce@jlai.lu ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I looked for the original article, abstract:

  Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn data, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel" Photo Big 5" predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.

  The PDF is downloadable here: scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citatio…

  I don’t have the time nor the expertise to read everything to understand how they take into account the bias that good looking white men with educated parents are way more likely to succeed at life.

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  • cypherpunks@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    one can also get the full paper directly from yale here without needing to solve a google captcha:

    …yale.edu/…/AI Personality Extraction from Faces …

    I don’t have the time nor the expertise to read everything to understand how they take into account the bias that good looking white men with educated parents are way more likely to succeed at life.

    i admittedly did not read the entire 61 pages but i read enough to answer this:

    spoiler

    they don’t

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    • underisk@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Lmao they source the photos from LinkedIn profiles. I’m sure that didn’t bias their training at all. Yes sir there’s no chance this thing is selecting for anything but facial features.

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  • Maeve@kbin.earth ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How many times has Big 5 been debunked yet employers still like it for reasons?

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  • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m wondering if things like FAS (which can have certain facial characteristics) are muddling the results as well.

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• technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s completely normal for fascists to promote pseudo-science.

  Indeed their publication is named after one of the worst pseudo-sciences.

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• Boppel@feddit.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  “okay, okay, hear me out: what if nazi methods, but for getting a job. we could even tattoo their number on their arms. it’s only consequent, we already devide by skin colour”

  WTF

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• cabbage@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Whatever it takes to keep hiring mediocre white men, I guess.

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Sooooo much evil stems from the well-warranted insecurity of mediocre white men. You gotta be secure in your mediocrity, fellas.

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    • cabbage@piefed.social ⁨51⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      Oh yeah. This is not an attack on mediocre white men—I’m one of them. We just have to learn to get over ourselves.

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• pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Everyone is kind of focusing on the hiring part, which is incredibly nazi already, but they’re saying for lending too. Fucking yikes.

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  • pdxfed@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How revolutionary. They’re going to upend the world of finance by trying to give loans to people who can’t structurally afford to pay them back in all likelihood? Isn’t that the entire playbook for wage slaves to those who are otherwise of sound mind and body?

    Maybe they try to just continue with the current (awful)status quo without the psuedoscience? Course then they’d lose out on the fascism.

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• DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Wait a minute, this sounds suspiciously familiar… I think I heard about the psudoscience of a government measuring the size of people’s heads to try to find out their ethnicity… somewhere in Rwanda… 🧐

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    There was also a German fella that got up to similar hijinks awhile back.

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• Brutticus@midwest.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Why stop there? Why just banks and hiring firms? why not allow access to Law Enforcement and use the phrenology robot to screen for pre crime?

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Why not just use phrenology on babies and get rid of the problematic ones right from the start?

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• JustJack23@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  How long before they start measuring skulls at job interviews

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  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is for skin tone and gender, not the insides.

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• Deathray5@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I think Lenin (for all his problems), had a good criticism of the economist though I can’t find a great source for it

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  • Postimo@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war.

    www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/…/01c.htm

    For all his problems??

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• 6nk06@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  What if being a nazi was meritocratic? How about no?

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s been the bedrock of American business since at least the 1960s.

    Our country is flush with very wealthy fascists, many of whom obtained the position thanks to their ancestors crawling across the ratlines and embedding themselves in the nascent tech sector.

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    • Maeve@kbin.earth ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Since the fifties? Since founding, and IDC if it was a word or Hitler had risen yet. The concept was baked into the Constitution with "free white landowner men."

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• AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Plastic surgery would become more popular. $10k work done to my nose to double my salary? Yes please.

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  • cypherpunks@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Plastic surgery would become more popular.

    One of the paper’s authors had the same thought:

    “Suppose this type of technology gets used in labor market screening, or maybe dating markets,” Shue muses. “Going forward, you could imagine a reaction in which people then start modifying their pictures to look a certain way. Or they could modify their actual faces through cosmetic procedures.”‌

    She also bizarrely claims

    “we are very much not advocating that this technology be used by firms as part of their hiring process.”

    and yet, for some reason:

    The next step for Shue and her colleagues is to explore whether certain personality types are drawn to specific industries or whether those personality types are more likely to succeed within given industries.

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    • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I just saw that tinder is testinf ai to match profiles.

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  • Ancalagon@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Also another way to get everyone to scan their face. Tie their employment to it.

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