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.

Comments

Re:Not Significant Accuracy

[DNS-and-BIND]

Gays are less than 2% of the population. They have an outsized influence because they are over-represented on the performing arts and Hollywood, and they provide a useful cudgel for the the cultural left to attack Christianity. Muslims also provide a cudgel to attack traditional Christianity (logically inconsistent with using gays for the same purpose but logic doesn't count for much in culture wars), and exercise a heckler's veto over the public debate. So they also, despite being less than 2% of the population in the US, have outsized influence.

"The long-established wisdom has it that 10% of the American public is gay or lesbian. But when asked, the majority of Americans estimate that almost 25% of their fellow citizens are homosexual to one extent or another."