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AI Can Detect Sexual Orientation Based On Person's Photo (cnbc.com)
ugen shares a report from CNBC: Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now accurately identify a person's sexual orientation by analyzing photos of their face, according to new research. The Stanford University study, which is set to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and was first reported in The Economist, found that machines had a far superior "gaydar" when compared to humans. Slashdot reader randomlygeneratename adds: Researchers built classifiers trained on photos from dating websites to predict the sexual orientation of users. The best classifier used logistic regression over features extracted from a VGG-Face conv-net. The latter was done to prevent overfitting to background, non-facial information. Classical facial feature extraction also worked with a slight drop in accuracy. From multiple photos, they achieved an accuracy of 91% for men and 83% for women (and 81% / 71% for a single photo). Humans were only able to get 61% and 54%, respectively. One caveat is the paper mentions it only used Caucasian faces. The paper went on to discuss how this capability can be an invasion of privacy, and conjectured that other types of personal information might be detectable from photos. The source paper can be found here.
They measured the ability to determine which is gay and which is straight among a pair of people (one of each) based on their dating profile pics.
You did not misread the summery though: the summery is simply wrong, and the article is misleading. The paper makes it clear though.
You've lived in some very unrepresentative neighborhoods if you think 12.5% of the human population is gay. Outside of TV shows and movies, mayyybe 4% of the real world population is gay or bisexual.
Sexual orientation is not orientation on which hole you stick your dick in. It's about who you find attractive. Contrary to the stereotypes there are quite a large number of gay men wo don't like anal sex and never do it. There are also hetero couples who do have anal sex. Sexual techniques and sexual orieantation are different things.
The thing is this won't be very useful for that kind of thing - far too many false positives.
It's estimated that about 5% of the population is gay. With this thing only having an 81% accuracy rate, this means there will be many more false positives than actual gay people - if you took a room with 100 people in, it would misidentify approximately 19 of the people as the sexual orientation they are not - meaning there would be roughly three times as many people mis-identified as gay than actual gay people. In other words, it's not actually very useful.
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What is the need to distinguish gay from straight?
It's important if you are looking for a mate.