Slashdot Mirror
Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long
An anonymous reader writes "Can computers pick up your age and gender from your tweets? If you want to give it a try, here's your chance: 'To develop your software for age and gender identification, we provide you with a training data set that consists of blog posts, Twitter tweets, social media texts, as well as hotel reviews.' Well, at least my paid Amazon reviews are safe for the time being..."
I am sure you can pick up on general mood of a person, I am sure you can pick up various clues, but if somebody is set on hiding themselves by providing false information, I don't think you'll be able to identify them without what NSA calls 'meta data', as in pattern of your behaviour. I don't think it will be possible to do a better job than guessing at about 50/50 chance ratio about a person's age and gender if the person in question is actively trying to portray something he or she is not in a single conversation. From a pattern of behaviour? Yes. From a single conversation? ... this assumes too much about people. It assumes that 16 y.o. girls are also not pretending to be something they are not as well...
You can't handle the truth.
here's your chance to write one.
I wish I could shell out 300 euro to have my next million-euro commercial product crowdsourced
Why do we have to help them train the replacement twitter scanners after the EU is trying to cut off their direct pipeline?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How are they going to catch pedophiles now?
For those puzzled by the description here, this is a software contest, with a 300 Euro prize :
When a blatant attempt to plug a link such as this submission pisses you off, you have a choice. You can stick around and continue to be fed drivel, or you can come (back?) to Usenet where the air is clean. Eternal September is a good reliable free Usenet server, and comp.misc is the new official Slashdot replacement,
Great, this is another scale of misleading headline.
>Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long
This is one of those posts where I have to read the summary, isn't it.
Now they'll know if they're talking to a real child or a cop. Yay !
Shouldn't that be the question?
So you like to chat with 16 year old girls on line?
I'am sick of descriptions and subjects written in gibberish. Reminds me of spam emails.
Do you have a big cock, how big can your cock get?
Win £xxx pounds if your cock can be bigger than their cock.
Is your cock hidden? can people see your cock? CLICK HERE NOW!
How the fuck did this get authed? Not only is it the worst subject and description i've seen in a while, its an insult to the readers here. Seriously we are here for a reason, we dont have an attention span of a fish.
Oh yeah thats right, its a Slashadvert supplied by Corex.
No offence, but if this shit carries on, i may as well start reading my spam emails. Target your audience, not Facebook muppets ffs.
Researcher A: This... This c-can't be right!
Researcher B: What's not right?
Researcher A: Apparently, 4chan really is populated by little girls.
Researcher C: *posting anonymously on /a/* See guys, I told you -- wearing a skirt makes it work. Also, Check'Em.
Cause in many states, they're legal. That is, so long as you don't photograph or record the fun, and/or offer booze, drugs, money, a job, education, a sense of hope or self esteem.
According to the research, 83% of slashdot posters are 16yr old girls. Go figure.
Once you have a program that can accurately classify the age/gender of a given text, anyone can impersonate that age/gender! Here's how it works:
Yeah, it could take a while if you just randomly flip bits in randomlyModify(), but it will eventually work. In a real-world scenario, someone would probably create a translation program. We already know that real-time translation devices exist (the US military used them in the early 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan to translate the voice of a US soldier's into the native language of the area), so there's no reason to think it wouldn't work to translate 40-yr-old-male-trucker to 16-yr-old-girl, except it would be easier because it would be parsing text instead of voice.
The "dialectizer" http://www.rinkworks.com/diale... "translates" English to Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. And there's an English to Ebonics translator at http://joel.net/EBONICS/Transl... so it won't be that difficult to get a translator that outputs 16-year-old-girl talk.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
OMG!!! Ponnies!
Table-ized A.I.
To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like for our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out or whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's drug-glands produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most powerful drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live longer, we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors did... but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry - without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society in which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of their time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense - mundane.
You will be personally identified by your posts.
a 22-year old woman. When she was 22 the future looked bright.
Why would I even want to impersonate a member of the opposite gender at half my age? If I manage to mingle with girls that age, then they will likely just talk about (for me) boring stuff. You will rarely find girls that age talking about programming, machinery or anything else really interesting.
screw the text content
timestamp, frequency and timing in general will give away much more information
Seems like it will be based too much on stereotypes. When I was 16, I typed in proper case (I wanted most of all to be a writer, and I used every opportunity to improve my grammar and typing), used big words in context, and did not easily use emoticons.
I suppose over time they could develop something keener, but if you're going to base it on the mean of all people in a certain age bracket, there will be enough exceptions to render the most useful applications of the software irrelevant.
OMG! Spelling Nutzis!
I could see a bunch of ways to make tons of money from this, starting with selling it to FaceBook for $19B.
Why would I publish it for 300 Euro again? I know they *claim* it's not published, but if they didn't sign an NDA, you're not going to get a patent out of it outside the U.S., and you're not going to have any protection against them just using your algorithms.
This is a really silly contest.
Didn't Gender Genie already attempt to do this? https://www.google.com/search?...
(I say "attempt" because I found that even in cases where I wasn't trying to fool it, it would often come up with the wrong gender.)
A friend of mine was working on sentiment analysis. They studied the content of yahoo answer and it was quite interesting all the correlations that you can make. The study is of course not enough to provide a direct identification, but it shows how many parameters you need to keep in mind when building a "virtual identity".
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/...
Now both people and computers will call me a girl.
You remind me of my wife, and this kind of "logic" is why women are arguably slightly worse writers.
If you think that is nonsense, than the whole original sexist line of argument is as well.
So what's your excuse?
Three hundred euro? The contest sparks my interest, but 300 is about what it would take to get me to fill out the entry form. To develop an effective NEW algorithm, code it, and test it in HOPES of winning the prize? Maybe for 300,000, maybe. 3,000,000 would be more like it.
I've developed exactly two truly innovative products. One I sold over $1 million worth, the other still provides $3,000 / month in net income . Why would I, or anyone skilled and innovative, touch this for 300 euro?
I managed to get my impersonation of a 16-year-old girl into the training set.
Who could possibly even care about this ?
Stories like this are sealing the fate of the once wonderful
Slashdot, which is now a cesspool of subhuman idiocy.
Honestly no one uses usenet anymore for anything but porn and piracy.
Your comment run through the "Jive" filter at the link you provided:
Then that out put filtered with the "Elmer Fudd":
Then, since a moose once bit my sister, that output run through the "Swedish Chef" filter:
Your Text, Dialectized (bork)
Yuoov Text, Deeevectized (jeefe-a)
De-a "deeevectizoo" http://vvv/ [vvv] su coot me-a sume-a sveck, Jeck.veenkvu'ks. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Ooh, det scvooy vebbeet! cum/deeeve-a... [veenkvu'ks. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Ooh, det scvooy vebbeet! cum] "tvunsvetes" Ingveesh t'Vedneck, JIBE, Cuckney, Ivme' Foodd, Svedeesh Cheff, Mu'un, Peeg Veteen, oo' Heckoo. Eh be-a beeed. Bork bork bork!.. Und dooe's un Ingveesh t'Ebuneecs tvunsvetu' et http://messa/ [messa] v.net/IBONICS/Tvunsv... [Messe' v.net] su's it vun't be-a det deefffficoovt t'get sume-a tvunsvetu' det ooootpoots 16-yeev-oovd-guet vep.
--
I'm nut vepeeteen' meh'sooff
I'm un X veendoo usoo; I'm un 'es-Veendoos usoo
Aannd, then run that output back through the "Jive" filter:
All of that proves that.....I'm easily entertained. :-)
Too bad there was not a Japanese anime filter as well.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
1. You can assume that someone is female if they act like a man without reason or accountability. 2. Anyone that shows interest in you sexually is an undercover police officer.
Really, these people need their dick sizes predicted by comments on SlashDot. Maybe then they'd understand that any form of profiling is equally bad, regardless of what you profile on.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What kind of person is willing to spend 300 euros for detecting 16 year olds online, mmmm?
I hope people participating in software like this know that they are developing de-anonymising software that is very useful for the NSA, and harmful to people trying to be anonymous.
I'm just going to throw my two cents out there because anyone who has played a MMORPG for three months can easily identify the gender and age of who they talk to online.
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, various blogs and such have the assistance of spellchecking from the browser. So it's slightly harder, but not entirely such.
The older (or at least more mature) someone is, the less intentional spelling gaffs you will see. Children, teens and immature adults will use short hand like "r u ok?" without a second thought. Mature and intelligent children, teens and adults will find the shorthand to be idiotic and not use it. While playing MMORPG's with what I speculate to be children between the age of 12 and 18 for the most part, the one thing I was constantly told was that I "sounded too proper" though it was contagious. The people I surrounded myself with used the short hand a lot less over time.
As for figuring out the gender of the person online. This goes back to short hand but instead now you look at emotion use. Young girls and teenage women will use emotional language with less intent behind it. A phrase like "Oh quit being such a bitch :D" may pair negative emotions with positive "I'm only joking" emoticons. Males on the other hand don't use emoticons very often, and will use aggressive language with others perceived to be male, even if they aren't. What muddies this up is that Gay and Lesbian individuals actually express emotional language more inline with the other gender. So a straight male and a lesbian female may write just as aggressively, but the female will have no reason to hold back using against males or females. Gay males may not be wanting to out themselves so easily so the language used may be more neutral. Then you have transgender individuals who pretty much have a unique emotional language all their own, and it's unfortunately very easy to identify (to be blunt, they tend to be exaggerated in line with the gender they identify as, but are inconsistent enough that they could false positive any automated gender identity test.)
I have no doubt this post will just disappear into the sea of Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot, but the easiest way to identify someone on the internet is to just ask tangentially related questions. Much easier done if they are single.
...an example of how a 16 yo girl would write one?
Computers are very bad at judging these things. It isn't their strength.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Doinggroup manufacture pyrolysis plant,pyrolysis reactors,waste tyre pyrolysis plant,our pyrolysis plant can pyrolyze waste tyres and waste plastic into fuel oil.
My attempts always fail when I show my hairy d*** in the chatroom for the 16yo boys....
Just sayin'
(J/K for the ones who don't understand dark humour ;)
grammar nazi, its called a grammar nazi
First of your post is offensive to readers. Not only that also takes as normal doing that. I mean who is the sick retard who need to impersonate a 16 years old girl. Also I don't believe the technology to be as accurate. I could make a research on psychological behavior of a 16 YO girl and I am pretty sure I would bet any system.
Is that you pedobear?
C'mon!
Why is a Jabber client worth US$16 billion and what would be advanced AI technology worth only 300 Euros? I would think anyone could get a lot more than that for what would be an AI breakthrough that could accurately profile online demographics based on social media posts. Isn't that what advertisers would die for?
You are going to have to pay me more than 300 euro for that. ~400 should do it.
Just read the competition, and thought I should point this out:
participants will be asked to classify the author of a set of tweets as journalist, politician, activist, professional, client, company, authority or citizen, since the fact of belonging to a certain category could determine the importance of the user's opinions.
If you submit a solution, know that it will be used to classify journalist and activist communications.
What's my motovation to hide as a 16 year old girl?
Male: Don't be a bitch.
Female: You are such a bitch.
Your comment is like a Bronies mating call! Stop!
Look at the original proposal by Turing. I imagine Turing was very conscious about gender issues since after winning wwii for the old boy network they decided he was a felon. It seems to me the five eyes gives us Turing test success and...wait for it ... means that is not really what we meant by human intelligence.
So that t-shirt that said it would replace me with a perl script has come to fruition?
Togged to the bricks, and all they offer me is a trip for biscuits. Just wanted a ring-a-ding ding and some Bruno slips me a Micky Finn in a clip joint. Next thing I know, I'm waking up in a flop with some Lunger wearing iron who suddenly runs to the window and starts drilling beans at a tin can full of Joes. So I make tracks before the coppers turn up with a meat wagon and someone ends leaving in a Chicago overcoat.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
I'm always mistaken for a male even though I'm female, but I'm a man rather a woman as I'm transgender (pre-op transsexual). I have the body of a woman but my brain is that of a male, I guess that's why my on-line activity is always seen as coming from a man rather than a woman. If you googled me (Zirconia Starfighter) you'd have a hard time to think that I've a woman's body based on my blog postings.