Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.
These models aren't going to pick up the correlation between facial structure and personality, they are going to pick up which families are high status and which are low, then provide the same pseudoscientific justifications for discriminating that people have been deploying since the dawn of pseudoscience.
Basically, these models are going to mislead people into thinking that a non-causal correlation is causal.
I wonder which will have more predictive power, the version where you let the AI do it’s thing or the version where you intervene to correct for things that are almost certainly wrong according to you.
Correcting is just steering a bias from one way to another.
Why is the shape of your face different than the lumps on your head? Even if you find a correlation in the data why would there be a causative relation? If I'm innocent one day but steal a loaf of bread do you expect the shape of my face to change? The idea makes no sense.
This is statistics, so an n = 1 doesn't really help your argument.
I agree though, that physiognomic "accuracy" based on self-assessments is of little value, like most self-assessments, and not very different from tarot readings or online IQ or MBTI tests.
Now when there are external assessments, these types of correlations are to be handled carefully in social sciences, because they can be self-fulfilling prophecies (people don't trust you because you look untrustworthy, so you end up behaving the way that gets you treated that way anyway) or straight up spurious, so the independent variable(s), if any, can be extremely non-evident: nutrition, environmental, cultural... This is, again, not unlike intelligence tests.
The best hard data we have is on a less delicate subject: aggression in hockey, where certain facial features correlate with quantifiable aggressive behaviors [0].
Because the shapes of portions of our bodies do not betray our moral character. It is nonsense, and debating this issue is so tiresome. I've worked in facial recognition for quite some time, and thank gawd nobody where I've worked had over-reaching opinions of our software's capabilities. For example, the "emotion recognition AI" fraudulently being marketed - we howled in laughter when those frauds appeared. However, while interviewing at other FR/ML companies, I meet a horror of over-reaching attitudes. I guess someone can work in trained algorithms and yet carry a head full of conspiracy-theory quality logical connections. That must be the case, because physical shape cannot dictate moral character, and debating the issue is Kafkaesque.
