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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 VLM on Friday February 02 2018, @12:21AM (1 child)
Yeah for clickbait "they" have to focus entirely on who's bumping what uglies in the bedroom, as if any of that matters other than WRT getting lots of clicks.
What I'd like to see the technology applied to is genealogy. No shit my appearance has a resemblance to my ancestors based on the relatively recent invention of cheap photographs beginning about a century and a half ago. It would be interesting and perhaps less DNA-intrusive spooky for a site like ancestry to try to find ancestry hints based on pix. You could see a little hint appear on ancestry "Based on pix, Ms blah blah has 5% odds of being a cousin of yours" etc.
Now what would be cool is a further hack predicting based on pix of descendants, great-great-grandpa WTF probably looked similar to this fuzzy jpeg.
Another "fun" application, real world phrenology, why women with the number of eyelashes vs that roundness of nostril corresponds directly with the genes for breast cancer variant #246264 such that the problem with genetic discrimination in fifty years might not be corrupt employers stealing our used toilet paper or WTF to genetically sequence us, but merely look at enough pix of our faces on social media and they know the odds to five decimal places of getting skin cancer or some damn thing. I'm not sure if this is a "good" application but I do think its going to be an "influential" application.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 02 2018, @10:48AM
I like how you separate the goodness of a potential technology, from it's probable use.
Potential employer demands a photo ID - scans it - decides that you have a high likelihood of abusing drugs, and you never get a call. Worse, that decision goes into a widely accessible database, and you are simply unemployable.
There are one HELL of a lot of evil uses for this kind of tech. And, as I stated elsewhere, the ACCURACY is irrelevant. Just like lie detector tests, if The Powers That Be decide they like this tech, they will use it.