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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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday February 02 2018, @12:00AM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 02 2018, @12:00AM (#631772)

    in nature, not nurture. Facial structure isn't set by choice

    Two separate and interesting "not quite" comments:

    1) The soy-boy meme where high soy consumption among people not genetically predisposed to soy intake (urban white males, perhaps?) results in very low T levels and increased estrogen levels and bodily changes to an aesthetic somewhat appealing to gay folks. Force feed a borderline bi male enough soy, the hormonal changes will push them gay. At least thats the "soy boy" meme. I only believe it about 60% to 80%, I think it more likely right than wrong but I'm not betting the farm on it. It smells believable in the sense that there's plenty of non-controversial science about amphibians and other animals where environmental contaminants can really fuck up their sexuality, and I'm not enough of a creationist to think human animals are magically protected from chemical toxins by some higher progressive power, so even if it turns out not to be soy, it seems realistic there exists some organic chemical out there that can screw up sexuality from the point of view of successful evolutionary reproduction.

    2) Classic facial structure issue is fatty face vs skinny face. And there's a subculture of gay men who like the emaciated aesthetic, so you could do worse for an algo with something like bulimic level skinny-face is a somewhat higher than average chance of gay. We're talking about a game of small percentages here, not "all skinny men is gay" level stupidity.

    I would be interested to know if the study corrected for hormonal imbalances and simple variation in body weight (so a subpopulation preselected of gay and straight 200 pound men with T levels around 800, lets say, with the implication the higher T means 200 pounds of muscle not lard)

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 02 2018, @10:38AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 02 2018, @10:38AM (#631939) Journal

    Anyone looking for a link between low testosterone in males, and high estrogen in males and females, need look no further than dairy products. Agrobusiness keeps the dairy cows loaded with hormones, antibiotics, and whatever else they deem "profitable". Milk and cheese is all-pervasive in the American diet, so you'll have a hard time avoiding all that.