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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.
If sexual orientation correlates highly with physical appearance, then I think this conclusively proves that sexual orientation is not a "decision."
* Unless this is picking up on subtle cues like gay men wearing eyeliner and gay women not wearing makeup. (Similar to lots of how gay men speak with an "affliction" and drive Saabs, while gay women drive Subarus.)
It might have the opposite effect. It is easy to hate a faceless "other". It is harder to be homophobic when you know your friends and relatives are gay.
One of the reasons that gay acceptance happened so fast is positive feedback. As gays felt more comfortable "coming out", more people realized that "normal" people they knew were gay, leading to even wider acceptance.
I would LOVE to get a copy of this program and, not only try it out on myself and my friends, (I think we're relatively secure in our sexuality) but try it on famous people.
Specifically: Republican lawmakers and perhaps even Christian preachers! (How about Mr. Macho himself, Putin?)
I really, really know I'm going to be down-modded for this but please hear me out. Haven't you wondered why those people who are so against homosexuality often turn out to be gay themselves? (Dennis Hastert and that lawmaker caught in the men's restroom soliciting a cop come to mind). Maybe it's because they are so ashamed that the only way they can bury their feelings is to actively suppress it. That's fine if you don't want to face the truth but the problem is being lawmakers, representatives of God, they infringe on many, many other peoples lives. So let's drag them out of the closet and into the photo booth! (Actually I don't think that'll be necessary, from what little I've read about this algorithm it doesn't require any particular lighting or "orientation" (ha ha) for the photo so many of the pictures of these famous people should be just fine.)
On a more serious note: This is just the latest in a trend of events which a friend of mine has said is "the end of privacy". With technologies like these (soon I'm sure they'll be able to analyze videos to see, by looking at imperceptible* subtle face color flushing and breathing patterns, who is attracted to whom), social media and the hack of personal databases like Equifax, NOTHING will be able to be kept secret. I wouldn't doubt that the CIA is already using some of this stuff to determine, remotely, if someone is lying on camera when they say something. It will be hard to legislature laws to keep it out of business and impossible to keep out of statecraft.
*imperceptible to humans
Ive always said the danger with AI isn't killer robots but killer humans. Machine learning is being used to perpetrate a huge invasion of privacy in the form of "big data" data matching. It's like countless companies , and governments, have deployed armies of robot detectives to sift out or repeat secrets , and not to solve crimes or whatever but to manipulate us into compliant consumers. This particularly feat is even more worrying however because I'm certain theres any number of theocratic fascists regimes , Christian , Muslim and beyond who would be very interested in this. Gay pre-crime , so to speak. Welcome to the future
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
This technology should be destroyed and the research should be buried. It could easily end up in Middle Eastern countries where they would use it to kill people based on the algorithm. Usually I don't support suppressing technology, but this is seriously a bad idea.
The Kinsey Report indicates a rate of 10% to 20% gay orientation in the population (for the Kinsey Report, orientation is a scale, not a binary assessment).
On the other hand, the Kinsey Report also says that 8% of men and 3.6% of women have had sex with animals... one of its less popular findings, you could say...
The Kinsey Report when reviewed later was found to have assumed a much higher rate of lieing by those who were gay than really happens in "anonymous" surveys. Allowing for this exaggeration the number came down to about 3-4 % with the same data.
The algorithm was trained on pictures from dating sites, which isn't exactly a representative data set. A large portion of the pictures have been manipulated or at least carefully selected by the person who uploaded them. There are a portion of gays who try to signal their gayness through things like styling and mannerisms, which would be easy for an algorithm to pick up on. These types are going to be overrepresented in the data set.
That's funny, because I've known a few gay people. For at least half of them, it's obvious that there's something deeply wrong with them, and it's tied into their homosexuality (ie, the behavior is either a cause of the obvious dysfunction or an expression of it).
And I know dozens or maybe even hundreds of gay people (my wife's profession in the arts has led to us meeting many more gay people than "average", I suspect) ... and in my experience there is no higher a percentage of screwed up folks than in the straight community.
I know its a cliche, but literally some of my best friends are gay & you could not hope to meet nicer, more compassionate, thoughtful, intelligent & stable folks.
So, your experience is not universal & you should not extrapolate from it.
It's estimated that about 5% of the population is gay.
Sure, if you take The 700 Club's word for it instead of, say, Kinsey. But hey, both gay and straight people try to ignore that bisexuality exists, or that most people are some degree of bisexual.
Furries make the internet go.