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posted by Fnord666 on Monday September 11 2017, @05:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-a-silly-name-for-an-AI dept.

Stanford University researchers have used software in an attempt to determine sexual orientation from photos:

"Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images" is the title of an article by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The abstract:

We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 74% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style).

Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. Prediction models aimed at gender alone allowed for detecting gay males with 57% accuracy and gay females with 58% accuracy. Those findings advance our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception. Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people's intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.

The images and the sexual orientation information were drawn from an online dating site. Note that the study was limited to white people from the United States, because of the relative lack of images of nonwhite gays and lesbians on the site.

Also at TechCrunch, The Advocate, and The Guardian.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by tfried on Monday September 11 2017, @07:42PM (1 child)

    by tfried (5534) on Monday September 11 2017, @07:42PM (#566342)

    How fast will the LGBTQWERTY lobby become teh most stalwart Pro-Life organization in the country?

    Good question, indeed. But also, how fast will Southern Baptists and others become pro-choice?

    Sooner or later Science! (praise be to Science!) will answer the nature or nurture question and this current either, neither or both as politically expedient will collapse into knowledge.

    Yeah, but what if that knowledge just happens to be "both" (as I think it probably will be)?

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:25AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:25AM (#566507)

    But also, how fast will Southern Baptists and others become pro-choice?

    Lots of lulz all around, no argument on that.

    Yeah, but what if that knowledge just happens to be "both" (as I think it probably will be)?

    That would be my best guess as well. But when we reach a point where you get a report of probabilities for various outcomes, it will be interesting to see what happens when "gay" hits 50-50 probability since it is all downside. Gay gets ya lower odds of grandkids, higher chance of disease, higher rate of other mental issues, higher rates of suicide. Of course what happens when some of those issues are also broken out as line items. And what if you get "70% chance of gay, 80% chance of +2SD Intelligence"? Abort, retry or ignore?

    We are heading for uncharted territory. And as others have mentioned, what happens when we throw in prenatal treatment options? If you get a 75% gay diagnosis how many would pay $X for a treatment that promises to cut those odds in half? Or what about something like bipolar, what would be big pharma's profit maximizing price for a treatment option? And what would those Pro -Life Southern Baptists do about these options that aren't abortion? What if they have a risk of death of the fetus?

    This is a rabbit hole that doesn't really have a bottom.