Automatic Racial Discrimination via Artificial Intelligence

I am a little curious why the title of this submission, "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images" was altered to the current, which is "Automatic Racial Discrimination via Artificial Intelligence" Especially when the abstract of the paper explicitly mentions "...using facial images of 1856 real persons controlled for race, gender, age and facial expressions..." This seems to be needless politicization of the topic, designed specifically to suppress discussion. Unfortunate as this topic seems rather interesting, and the finding that criminals and noncriminals divide so easily into distinct, detectable groups would be interesting to discuss here.

The title is misleading. Although I get that this is dangerous, and trained on the right (wrong?...) dataset it could be an automatic racial profiler. The paper is written by Chinese researchers from Chinese Universities, and all of the pictures shown of people in the dataset appear to be Chinese or at least "Asian" race in American racial categories. This makes it hard to assume their technique will automatically have racial bias, although I imagine running it on a set of US criminals could disproportionately flag black or latino people as criminals. The core idea of classifying people as criminals based on facial structure is equally gross without the racial component though.

Hilarious, but wouldn't it be useless when the population you use it on is mostly not criminal?

If I had a population that was 90% non-criminal, and the accuracy of the face predictor something like 75% (for non-criminal and criminal), wouldn't my predictor that always outputs non-criminal almost always be more accurate?