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AI Can Detect Sexual Orientation Based On Person's Photo (cnbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the say-cheese dept.

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.

8 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. Just because you can doesn't mean you should... by Baloo+Uriza · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...definitely applies to this situation. This has some pretty negative implications in particularly homophobic regions. All the more reason not to visit the pacific northwestern US or the middle eastern region in general if this thing gets to be widespread.

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    1. Re:Just because you can doesn't mean you should... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All the more reason not to visit the pacific northwestern US

      Wait, is the Pacific Northwest homophobic? I have some friends that live up in Oregon and they're extremely gay and I never heard them complain about the region being particularly difficult for them. One just sent me a photo taken from his backyard of a mountain being consumed by fire. I'm pretty sure he had nothing to do with that, though, despite the fact that he's flaming.

      (I used this joke with him, too, and he didn't seem to mind. He would have told me if it had offended him.)

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    2. Re:Just because you can doesn't mean you should... by Cyberax · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We get plenty of refugees from Kansas and Oklahoma....

    3. Re:Just because you can doesn't mean you should... by Insanity+Defense · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Are they screwed up purely because of being gay or are they screwed up from a lifetime of anti gay conditioning and gay persecution causing them to live in fear?

    4. Re:Just because you can doesn't mean you should... by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So in terms of 'homophobia', do I irrationally fear any of them? No. Do I hate any of them? No. But it's obvious at least half of them are screwed up.

      Knowing that people hate you for your sexuality and getting abuse for it from strangers and (depending on your background) former friends and family? Or alternately that they'd hate you if you were truthful about an unchangeable and fundamental part of yourself that you have to keep covered up every day of your life? (#)

      Hmm, yeah. I guess that sort of thing might screw some people up.

      Oddly, this would suggest that the actual issue is how homosexuals have traditionally been treated...

      And that leads me to the conclusion that it's best not to encourage or approve of homosexual conduct, because it's self-destructive behavior.

      ...making people like you the problem, not homosexuality itself.

      (#) Both of which were the case in most Western societies until recently, and *still* aren't as bad as the hostility homosexuals in many countries continue to face today- e.g. fear of being tortured or killed.

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  2. Not Significant Accuracy by kenwd0elq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the AI were to simply assign scores of "Straight" to EVERYONE, it would achieve 90% accuracy for men and 85% accuracy for women, since about 90% of men are straight and about 85% of women are straight. So scores of 91% and 85% accuracy are not statistically significant.

  3. Re:Massively Flawed by swb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    these idiots failed to account for a common practice among hetero women on dating sites, which is to falsely claim to be seeking other women as a means to reduce or eliminate an onslaught of tacky propositions from clueless het-boys.

    So how exactly does that gambit work for hetero women seeking men? Is this a thing that clued-in men know about? Some secret signaling that says "my profile says woman seeking woman, but I really want guys?" Do they not get an even tackier group of responses from bros hoping they'll hit a jackpot with a lesbian with a secret yen for yang and possibly a FFM threesome? What about fending off the lesbians who take it seriously?

    And then there's the whole potential for lack of response, eliminating non-gross men who think cruising the women seeking women section is tacky and a waste of effort.

    I mean, I'm genuinely curious here, if this is really a thing.

  4. Re:Massively Flawed by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So how exactly does that gambit work for hetero women seeking men? Is this a thing that clued-in men know about? Some secret signaling that says "my profile says woman seeking woman, but I really want guys?"

    Dating websites generally require you to fill out a profile before you're allowed to approach other members. Women seeking men who fill out women seeking women on the website are among the 80% of women chasing 20% of the men. Those 20% know the deal, because they get approached on an hourly basis, and every single woman disclaims her orientation tag in her approach. Those women don't want to be approached at all. They want to do the approaching.