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Facial Recognition Technology Detects Entrepreneurs, Outperforming Human Experts (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on Sep 22, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A system trained on pairs of photos, one entrepreneur and one non-entrepreneur, learned to spot entrepreneurs from faces alone. It guessed right 79.5% of the time, while 783 human judges stayed at chance, showing faces can leak private job details.

Abstract · AI, Entrepreneurs, and Privacy: Deep Learning Outperforms Humans in Detecting Entrepreneurs from Image Data

Occupational outcomes like entrepreneurship are generally considered personal information that individuals should have the autonomy to disclose. With the advancing capability of artificial intelligence (AI) to infer private details from widely available human-centric data (e.g., social media), it is crucial to investigate whether AI can accurately extract private occupational information from such data. In this study, we demonstrate that deep neural networks can classify individuals as entrepreneurs with high accuracy based on facial images sourced from Crunchbase, a premier source for entrepreneurship data. Utilizing a dataset comprising facial images of 40,728 individuals, including both entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using a contrastive learning approach based on pairs of facial images (one entrepreneur and one non-entrepreneur per pair). While human experts (n=650) and trained participants (n=133) were unable to classify entrepreneurs with accuracy above chance levels (>50%), our AI model achieved a classification accuracy of 79.51%. Several robustness tests indicate that this high level of accuracy is maintained under various conditions. These results indicate privacy risks for entrepreneurs.

Martin Obschonka, Christian Fisch, Tharindu Fernando, Clinton Fookes
arXiv:2409.03765 · cs.CV, eess.IV · submitted Aug 19, 2024 · updated Mar 8, 2025
abstract · pdf · 46 pages, 2 tables, 11 figures

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Would be interesting to do genotype statistical analysis to suss out what part of DNA is responsible for this trait (leading to the detected facial features indicative of entrepreneurial drive). You might know your child is a potential entrepreneur at birth, or even before.