# The Criminality From Face Illusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03895/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [A Survey on Bias in Visual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07919/) (2021)
- [Algorithmic Fairness in Business Analytics: Directions for Research and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10991/) (2022)
- [AI and Blackness: Towards moving beyond bias and representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03687/) (2021)
- [Reasoning LLMs for User-Aware Multimodal Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01700/) (2025)
- [Explainable AI is Responsible AI: How Explainability Creates Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01555/) (2023)
- [Hidden Technical Debts for Fair Machine Learning in Financial Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10510/) (2021)
- [Dataset Biases and Shortcut Learning in Motion-Based AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00948/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Face Recognition for Monozygotic Twins: The Celeb Twins Test Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01141/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The automatic analysis of face images can generate predictions about a person's gender, age, race, facial expression, body mass index, and various other indices and conditions. A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person's face in order to predict the person's status as Criminal / Non-Criminal. Predicting criminality from face may initially seem similar to other facial analytics, but we argue that attempts to create a criminality-from-face algorithm are necessarily doomed to fail, that apparently promising experimental results in recent publications are an illusion resulting from inadequate experimental design, and that there is potentially a large social cost to belief in the criminality from face illusion.