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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.
Maybe they're getting interference from a gay weather balloon.
#DeleteChrome
...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.
Furries make the internet go.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
... they finally got their fruit machine...
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.
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.
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.