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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-it-tell-which-personality-is-currently-active? dept.

This psychologist's "gaydar" research makes us uncomfortable. That's the point.
Michal Kosinski used artificial intelligence to detect sexual orientation. Let him explain why.
By Brian Resnick@B_resnickbrian@vox.com Jan 29, 2018, 12:00pm EST

In September, Stanford researcher Michal Kosinski published a preprint of a paper that made an outlandish claim: The profile pictures we upload to social media and dating websites can be used to predict our sexual orientation.

Kosinski, a Polish psychologist who studies human behavior from the footprints we leave online, has a track record of eyebrow-raising results. In 2013, he co-authored a paper that found that people's Facebook "likes" could be used to predict personal characteristics like personality traits (a finding that reportedly inspired the conservative data firm Cambridge Analytica).

For the new paper, Kosinski built a program with his co-author Yilun Wang using a common artificial intelligence program to scan more than 30,000 photos uploaded to an unnamed dating site. The software's job? To figure out a pattern about what could distinguish a gay person's face from a straight person's.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/29/16571684/michal-kosinski-artificial-intelligence-faces

I hate the terms "Must see TV" and "must read" and similar terms. But, this article comes pretty close to "must read" for those who wish to understand where computer are going to take us. Especially read the conversation between Resnick and Kosinski - the research is not really about homosexuality, but about analyzing people in general.

Michal Kosinski

Exactly.

It proves to be uncomfortably accurate at making predictions.

We know that companies are already collecting this data and using such black boxes to predict future behavior. Google, Facebook, and Netflix are doing this.

Basically, most of the modern platforms are just virtually based on recording digital footprints and predicting future behavior.

Psychologists would say, "Oh, yes, that's true, but not personality. This is just pseudoscience." I'm like, wait. You can accept that you can predict 57 things, but if I say, "What about 58?" you say, "This is absolutely theoretically impossible. This is pseudoscience. How can you even say that?"

Science or pseudoscience, we can bet that corporate America and the government are going to be using this.

A smart person with a computer and access to the internet can judge sexual orientation of anyone in the world, or millions of people simultaneously with very little effort, which makes lives of homophobes and oppressive regimes just a tiny bit more easy.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:21PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:21PM (#631493)

    It "makes lives of homophobes... just a tiny bit more easy."

    Well, all we have to do is profile them, and post. You'll usually find that the loudest haters are just projecting their own "perversions". And the military, well! At least the American one is still the world's best dressed! Oh, but the Nazis, truer fashion mavens you will never find. I can't understand why they lost the war... Well, we did build better looking airplanes..

    All your dictators are closet fags, actually they are just beasts. They will fuck anything in their path.. That's part and parcel to their power.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:28PM (#631495)

    Adolt Hilter loved him some Jewish anus.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:03PM (#631514)

    See? For instance, with that "Troll" mod, you can see that the moderator is obviously gay, and is ashamed of it. Homosexuals are just as bigoted against the truth as everybody else. They are trying so hard to blend in. When it fails, they lash out in frustration. Homos can be among the meanest people on the planet. This is why people are repulsed by them. If gays were actually happy, they would get along with the rest of the world just fine.