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Computer Spots Fakers Better Than People Do
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Using sophisticated pattern matching software, researchers have had substantially better success with a computer, than was obtained with human subjects, in spotting faked facial expressions of pain. [Original, paywalled article in Current Biology] From the Reuters piece: '... human subjects did no better than chance — about 50 percent ...', 'The computer was right 85 percent of the time.'"
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The people who programmed "the computer" were better.
Perhaps watching faked facial expressions on TV and whatnot has dulled our ability to distinguish them?
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My guess is that this would be useful for detecting people who only want narcotics to sell, or to use recreationally, But a computer algorithm that falsely identifies pain sufferers as fakers would be downright cruel, whereas a computer algorithm that fails to identify fakers is merely less useful for drug control efforts.
Computers do not feel empathy. Perhaps the empathy humans feel when seeing others in pain overrides any minor inconsistencies in the visual side of things. Further, humans do not "analyze" one others' faces to identify an emotion. We see faces (even if it's the same ones over and over) so many times that it's just an automatic, generalized classification. If people often faked painful facial features, and there was some strong motivation to identify that fact, then I'm sure we would be more adept at it. The only time I can think of in a real-world setting where people fake painful facial features is in jest or to be funny or "sarcastic" in some way (not counting football (aka soccer) matches). Thus the overall context totally reveals the expression to be fake and thus visual side of things is just an afterthought.
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Still not good enough to easily deny someone pain meds.
What did they use to teach the computer?
Did they torture a bunch of undergraduates with cattle prods, and then load the photographs of the undergraduates screaming in pain into their great big giant neural network of "true positives"?
Versus photographs of other undergraduates, deeply immersed in their favorite pornography websites, as their "true negatives"*?
And who were the human beings who were competing against the computers?
Random joe sixpacks plucked right off of the street, or folks like Military Medics and Civilian EMTs and Oncology Nurses and Trauma Surgeons, who have a lifetime of experience watching true pain in their patients and who know exactly what it looks like?
*And God only knows how they would categorize the undergraduates who like to hang out at sites like kink.com, watching naked people being tortured with cattle prods.
Banks all over the world uses scanners and computers to spot fake money too, because they don't think the humans can do it as well.
I would really want to go over the photos they were showing people. I can think of three different ways this study was contaminated.
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Just a thought, but might this simply indicate that fake facial are trained/wired to fool humans (and the attributes a human watcher would consciously or subconsciously use to judge the expression), not computers?
This technology can get quite dangerous if it becomes good at detecting people with guilty expressions.
It was ***ice water*** not actual pain.
from TFA:
For the first one, they told them to ***make a fake painful face***
I'd say humans did just fine...better than the researchers who designed the study!
The computer just recognized the patterns it was told...it was optimized on their faces
another AI hype/fail
Thank you Dave Raggett
I often wonder how well our medical establishment has studied the euphoric effect of opiates and how they contribute to or even in some cases surpass the functional pain relief.
I had a traumatic hand injury two months ago which involved a partial amputation of one of my fingers. I experience a lot of "pins and needles" nerve stimulation and some false limb pain (pressure or stabbing-type sensation where I have no finger) and generalized fatigue in my hand. I take small (5 mg) doses of oxycodone once or twice a day and I "feel better" but without necessarily specific reduction of any one kind of pain -- I still feel it, but it bothers me less.
I don't think it's an addiction response; some days I take zero and don't feel any classic withdrawal symptom I've ever read about. But I sometimes wonder if the pain reduction is really the result of interaction with my pain, or because the eurphoric nature of the drug just makes me feel overall better, raising my psychological tolerance of pain without actually reducing the pain itself.
I wonder philosophically if it "matters" -- if the drug produces a euphoria that allows me to tolerate the pain, is that somehow less legitimate than some functional reduction of pain that may be the drug's principal purpose? What is the effect and what is the side effect? Os is it just a question of dose versus ancillary risks (whether it's addiction or some other more organic disturbance, eg, skin rash, etc).
So random people weren't very good at it, but what about experts in this sort of thing, like a Sherlock Holmes? How would they compare to the computer?
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due to my having an illness that is at times VERY painfull , and because my GP has known me for over a decade , he does not just look at my FACE ! a couple of years ago , he told his secrety to call an ambulance because of my STANCE , and that was before i even had a chance to say anything to him , due to the fact that i try not to worry my familie , i have learned not to show how much pain i am in !! another thing is that most people do not seem to know that a person in a lot , and i do mean a lot of pain , or in shock behave differently . for example a person i know had an ulcer burst , a phycologist needed to know if he had his pension card when he called an ambo for him , because the person that was ill had problems answering , the other bloke was getting angry ! i squatted down ( the ill person was sitting ) and asked if he had the card that he had to show to a busdriver to get the consetion rate , the answer was " yes " and came straight away ! the point i am trying to make is that looking at someone's face in pain " or not " is only a small part , in the assesment .
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL