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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Monday September 11 2017, @08:17PM (2 children)
Your parents might have something to say about that as well, particularly in the context where we're talking about the potential for parents to screen at the fetus stage for genes that might lead to homosex ahead of time.
"In ages before contraception was invented, parents having tons of kids was the norm."
Yes, but we live in a different time now.
"Citation needed."
Citation needed the other way as well. There have been at least dozens if not hundreds of related studies and they don't always agree. But the naïve genetic determinicism you seem to be endorsing is certainly incorrect. There's no gene that makes you "identify" as a "homosexual." That's every bit as nutty as any religious tract you want to point to. Humans in our current form have been around for about a quarter of a million years, 'identifying as homosexual' is a very new meme, perhaps a century or so old.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @03:37PM (1 child)
There are homosexual animals, that should be a major clue for you. Generally every person is on the spectrum between pure homosexuality and heterosexuality. You can argue all you want but you'll still be wrong, and likely your subconscious is causing you grief since you won't acknowledge the times when you feel some mild attraction toward a man. Its ok, humans die off at pretty reliable intervals so with any luck we won't be burdened with ignorance forever.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 12 2017, @04:05PM
Its ok, humans die off at pretty reliable intervals so with any luck we won't be burdened with ignorance forever.
Wrong, at least if by "forever" you mean "as long as the human race exists". We keep breeding new idiots. Just look at the idiocy in Charlottesville: many of the neo-Nazis were fairly young, and the murderer was only about 20. It's a fallacy to think that young people are so much more enlightened than old people; after all, who's having all the kids these days? Mostly religious conservatives.