Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long

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Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 20, 2014 @11:26AM from the because-soon-enough-you'll-be-17-anyhow dept.

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..."

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assuming too much by roman_mir · 2014-02-20 11:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

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...

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You can't handle the truth.
1. Re:assuming too much by Sique · 2014-02-20 11:59 · Score: 2
  
  Women are also, arguably, slightly better writers than men on average because they make more of an effort in primary school.
  ... which just means that an slightly above average man can impersonate an average woman.
  
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  .sig: Sique *sigh*
2. Re:assuming too much by geekoid · 2014-02-20 12:29 · Score: 2
  
  What a pile of crap.
  
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  The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
3. Re:assuming too much by thunderclap · 2014-02-20 16:23 · Score: 2
  
  If I had mod points I would mod that funny because: I get it. Also there is actually a group of grown adult men who love MLPFIM (my little pony: friendship is magic)
  Google bronies if you are curious.
4. Re: assuming too much by lucm · 2014-02-20 18:00 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Gotcha, you're a dude. Girls never use "btw": they use "fyi" with a whiny, self-righteous sarcastic undertone.
  Thinking of that, this applies to flamboyant gay males as well.
  So you are either an overweight straight guy in his early 30s or a Perl script written by an overweight straight guy in his early 30s.
  
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  lucm, indeed.
5. Re:assuming too much by canadiannomad · 2014-02-20 20:08 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Even if someone got a program that was "pretty good" at figuring out age and gender, I strongly doubt they could make it accurate enough not to be a huge civil liberties problem.
  IF someone were to make a program that was 99% accurate, that would still be some 3million 16 year old girls in the US getting their houses raided in case they are a perv. (ok they aren't likely to raid on evidence like that alone, but they might use it as probable cause to 'dig deeper' into who she is... and if she caused the false flag then she is likely an outlier who the gov't wants to know more about anyway, for retraining... I'll go don my tinfoil hat now.)
  
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  Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
6. Re:assuming too much by allcoolnameswheretak · 2014-02-20 21:47 · Score: 2
  
  Really? Look up any live performance of a boy band on YouTube and then show me the equivalent with gender-reversal.
  Except Japan doesn't count. Japanese are aliens.
If you want to read a summary that makes sense by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-20 11:34 · Score: 5, Funny

here's your chance to write one.
Wow, what a great racket by EmagGeek · 2014-02-20 11:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

I wish I could shell out 300 euro to have my next million-euro commercial product crowdsourced
1. Re:Wow, what a great racket by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-20 11:59 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  You don't give source code.
  and the note : By submitting your software you retain full copyrights. You agree to grant us usage rights only for the purpose of the PAN competition. We agree not to share your software with a third party or use it for other purposes than the PAN competition.
  Now that doesn't mean they won't use it. But it is easy to get it to call home if the date on the machine is 6 months later, or start some other more subtle problems. reverse the sexes, give data directly from the randomiser. Whatever you feel like.
  If they are using it for anything else, you can have them.
This is a software contest by mbone · 2014-02-20 11:41 · Score: 5, Informative

For those puzzled by the description here, this is a software contest, with a 300 Euro prize :

An award of 300 euros for the best performing approach to author profiling (age and gender identification) is sponsored by Atribus (Corex).
1. Re:This is a software contest by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-20 11:59 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  What they forget to mention is that if your program also identifies ethnicity, you will be fined for racism.
Broken Slashadvert Yet again by danknight48 · 2014-02-20 11:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:The FBI is screwed! by Garridan · 2014-02-20 12:14 · Score: 2

Hire and train real 13 year-old girls to seduce 'predators' online and lure them into an IRL meeting. Duh.
What about the following sites? by knorthern+knight · 2014-02-20 12:27 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Stereotyping by phmadore · 2014-02-20 13:19 · Score: 2

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.
Style leaves a lot of clues by godrik · 2014-02-20 14:37 · Score: 2

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/...
Just what I need ... by MacTO · 2014-02-20 14:54 · Score: 5, Funny

Now both people and computers will call me a girl.
yeah anyone who can, won't for 300€ by raymorris · 2014-02-20 15:08 · Score: 2

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?
A couple of rules to live by. by dietdew7 · 2014-02-20 17:30 · Score: 2, Funny

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.
Mission Suspect by Borg+Bucolic · 2014-02-20 18:22 · Score: 2

What kind of person is willing to spend 300 euros for detecting 16 year olds online, mmmm?