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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: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:53PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:53PM (#631686) Journal

    This would suggest it has nothing to do with the photo one self selects to upload to a dating website.

    I might encourage you to read some critiques of the study's interpretation and conclusions here [medium.com]. There have been responses to these criticisms too, but if you read this stuff, it becomes much less clear-cut.

    For example, the study claims a 71% success rate on female faces for determining homosexuality. The critical response I linked above showed that they could achieve a 63% success rate just by creating a naive algorithm on the basis of whether a woman wears eyeshadow. (Lesbians apparently are statistically less likely to wear eyeshadow.)

    If they include sex more yes/no questions about presentation (“Do you ever use makeup?”, “Do you have long hair?”, “Do you have short hair?”, “Do you ever use colored lipstick?”, “Do you like how you look in glasses?”, and “Do you work outdoors?”), they increased the success rate of their simplistic algorithm to 70%, which is nearly identical to the performance of the algorithm based on a photo. Note that all of these questions are based on superficial characteristics that have nothing to do with "innate" facial features, but rather are about stylistic or cultural choices: the first four obviously are superficial things that would influence a photo appearance. Lesbians are apparently more likely to wear glasses. And the "outdoors" question comes from the fact that a poll showed those with homosexual interests had a slightly less likely chance of working outdoors, which correlated with paler skin... i.e., whether they had a "tan" or not. (The study authors from TFA had suggested a difference in skin color for homosexuals due to hormones, but it might have simpler origins...)

    That link also notes that in some other studies involving photos taken in controlled lab conditions (same angle, same lighting, no glasses consistently, no make-up), previous AI algorithms basically dropped to chance in terms of ability to predict homosexuality.

    That doesn't deny that there couldn't be SOME level of judgment based on facial characteristics that are more "innate" in homosexuals. But it seems there's a pretty strong component of these judgments that could be based on superficial characteristics, style choices, and "social signaling" in the way photos are chosen (lighting, angle, pose, etc.).

    Let the authors repeat their study with lab controlled photos taken under the same lighting, pose, and other superficial characteristics controlled for. Then we can reevaluate how strong their claims that their algorithm is picking up on fundamental aspects of facial structure (perhaps determined by more basic physiological characteristics like hormones, etc.) are.

    (Note, by the way, that there's good reason to be suspicious of such claims. There is a VERY long history in science of trying to identify various "degenerates" based on basic physical characteristics. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries this was particularly pronounced, with lots of scientists claiming to be able to identify those with criminal disposition, homosexuals, etc. just by measuring various elements of their heads or bodies. These sorts of studies were often praised by eugenicist movements, which even forced sterilization on some such individuals with such defining characteristics. I'm NOT being alarmist here -- I'm just noting that there are still those who want to claim homosexuals are "degenerate" in some way, and they'd love physical data proving they are different in measurable, perceptible ways. And maybe they are... maybe there are some basic physical characteristics that can make the difference. But this study hasn't really met the bar for telling us how much of its algorithm -- if any -- is actually differentiating on that basis... rather than more superficial characteristics of the photos determined by cultural signalling.)

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