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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 ESTIn 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.
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.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:08PM (6 children)
If an AI can identify from a photo someone's sexual orientation, can other characteristics be identified as well?
Who knows, before you know it, we'll have AI's can can identify, from only a photograph, whether someone is non-white. This will be a boon not only to homophobes but to Stephen Miller, Stephen Bannon, and . . . well to be concise much of the Trump administration.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:18PM (2 children)
Smart TVs could ID gay actors.
Facebook could crawl the web to ID people's orientation. (Not that this is at all creepy. It's just that almost anything Facebook does makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:25PM (1 child)
or gay politicians. how about identifing lying politicians?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday February 02 2018, @12:03AM
sigh, Kidz these days...
The source code for that function looks something like "return true;" for various local values of implementation language.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 02 2018, @12:10AM
If you recall the "coincidence detector" addon for chrome which was a minor scandal from a couple years ago, the marketing image for the addon was the coincidence detector displaying the wikipedia article for "neoconservative" and almost every name in the article was wrapped by parenthesis, what an amazing coincidence, LOL. Arguably that was a far more complicated technological task than analyzing a photograph, yet it was accomplished a long time ago by a very small team and wasn't really all that hard.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 02 2018, @10:41AM (1 child)
Can an AI predict proclivity toward criminal conduct? We have a Minority Report situation arising.
Can an AI determine which of the many mental illnesses a person might suffer from? Bear in mind that shrinks claim that 20% (or more in some cases) of people are mentally ill.
The cops will love a tool like this, as will repressive regimes. And, NOT just for the ability to predict sexual preferences.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 02 2018, @05:50PM
Maybe not from photos. But I bet we've just seen the tip of the iceberg on the amazing things AI classifiers are going to learn. Maybe not from photos but from other patterns shared by serial killers or show patterns of mental illness.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.