
New AI can guess a person's sexual orientation from a photograph - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/07/new-artificial-intelligence-can-tell-whether-youre-gay-or-straight-from-a-photograph
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Houshalter
They claim 91% accuracy on a balanced dataset. E.g. where there the ratio of
gays to straights is 50:50. To get a ratio of correct:incorrect of 91:9 on
such a dataset, their test must increase or decrease the odds a person is gay
by 10.

Now in the general population, the ratio of gays to straights is about 16 to
984 (1.6%)†. So if their test gives someone a positive reading, that increases
the odds to 162 to 984, or 14%. So you can't use this test to accurately guess
someone's sexual orientation. Simply because gay people are so rare that even
a few percent of straight people misclassified will overwhelm the number of
actual gay people.

But nonetheless it is much more accurate than humans or the base rate. And it
is scientifically interesting that there are physical features that strongly
correlate with sexual orientation.

EDIT: another article claims this:

>However, when asked to pick out the ten faces it was most confident about,
nine of the chosen were in fact gay. If the goal is to pick a small number of
people who are very likely to be gay out of a large group, the system appears
able to do so.

†These estimates vary by a lot and could be 3 times that, which would make the
test much more accurate. Perhaps as high as 42% accuracy. And some people
believe sexuality is more of a spectrum than a binary straight/gay. If so the
test might be identifying straight individuals that lean more gay/bisexual
than normal, and it's misclassifications wouldn't be so unreasonable.

The test may also give varying degrees of confidence, and it may give much
higher confidence to some people than others. The edit I made confirms that,
and there are some individuals that it can tell are definitely gay or
straight. But for most it is more uncertain.

~~~
svantana
You're assuming every trial is of equal difficulty, which seems unlikely. I
would guess that the system can classify some images with very good
confidence, while others are more of a coin toss. But you're correct that the
'straight' prior is very strong.

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Houshalter
The image from the paper is very interesting and I'm surprised they didn't
include it in the article:
[https://i.imgur.com/zs8RWIz.png](https://i.imgur.com/zs8RWIz.png)

~~~
Aron
Those images appear (just going by my perception) to be dominated
substantially by a single person, presumably the person with the most extreme
score on the scale. The gay male even has the echo of glasses on, which almost
certainly can't be common enough in presence and shape to be visible over a
lot of images. Anyone offer an explanation?

~~~
Houshalter
Perhaps glasses are more likely on homosexuals for whatever reason, and so the
images it classifies as "most likely to be gay" are much more likely to have
glasses.

Another interesting thing is that both the straight faces appear to be older
and heavier set than the gay faces. I can't even imagine a possible
explanation for that. I'd like to see the true composite of faces, rather than
this one reweighted by their algorithm.

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fallingfrog
I think they missed something. I read the paper, and partway through they have
a set of merged images of all the gay and straight people of each sex. One
thing that jumps out at you is that the gay dataset is on the whole composed
of people who are at least _20 years younger_ than the straight dataset.
They're not seeing a horizontal difference, they're looking at a generational
difference- my guess is that younger people feel more open about homosexual
feelings, while older people see those feelings as shameful, and that's mostly
what they've identified. It's the tank problem all over again, they're not
measuring what they think they're measuring.

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notahacker
A big problem with trying to do draw conclusions about groups' typical
physiological features from research using dating profiles is that there's a
selection bias in which users will and won't post clear facial shots from
neutral angles suited to processing by this algorithm (for a variety of
reasons varying from perceived beauty norms of gay subcultures to social
acceptance within their ethnic group) and that might well dominate any actual
difference between the average physiology of gay and straight men.

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musashizak
And if one is bisex? Or in a moment of life have a particolar sexual orientati
on?

~~~
lithos
You'll probably change your grooming habits, hairstyle, and similar to be
attractive to who you want to be.

The bot didn't just go for fixed features.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> The research found that gay men and women tended to have “gender-atypical”
features, expressions and “grooming styles”, essentially meaning gay men
appeared more feminine and vice versa. The data also identified certain
trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger
foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller
foreheads compared to straight women.

Besides the fact that this sounds deeply offensive for gay people, it also
sounds terribly, awfully unlikely.

In fact, it reminds of the recent "phrenology" paper, where deep nets were
used to, allegedly, "identify criminals from their faces":

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602955/neural-network-
lea...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602955/neural-network-learns-to-
identify-criminals-by-their-faces/)

Nowadays we know that sexual orientation is something that is neither set in
stone, nor absolute (people are known to change throughout their lives, as
well as have occasional partners of the "other" sex, whichever is opposite to
their normal orientation). So the very idea of an accurate "gaydar" is
ludicrous in and of itself.

Finally, I wonder why anyone with an ounce of brains would seriously consider
training a machine learning algorithm to recognise peoples' orientation. What
morally justifiable practical purpose could there possibly be?

~~~
Houshalter
How is this any more offensive or unlikely than stuff like digit ratio
research? The idea that sexual orientation correlates with other features is
very old, and this paper would seem to prove it. We've known for awhile that
identical twins were much more likely than chance to share sexual
orientations.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation)

>Nowadays we know that sexual orientation is something that is neither set in
stone, nor absolute

I don't think that's really correct. Sure there are exceptions, but most
people stick to one sexual orientation, or at least somewhere in between on a
spectrum. Attempts at converting gay people to become straight were
unsuccessful. In fact this was one of the biggest arguments for gay rights,
that it isn't a choice and can't be changed.

>What morally justifiable practical purpose could there possibly be?

This proves a biological origin for sexuality. Which is both scientifically
interesting, and a strong argument for gay rights in places where it is still
seen as some kind of sin or mental illness.

Anyone hypothetically using this tool to discriminate against homosexuals
would have to admit the tool works of course. And that would mean
homosexuality is biological, which would contradict their own beliefs.

Lastly do you have any actual argument against the papers methodology? Or the
phrenology paper you link for that matter. Your comment is basically "I don't
like the conclusions so I won't accept them". That's not terribly scientific.

~~~
nostromo123
> Your comment is basically "I don't like the conclusions so I won't accept
> them". That's not terribly scientific.

The whole "gender is a social construct" movement is based on rejecting actual
scientific evidence, so don't be surprised...

~~~
yorwba
The distinction between sex as biological and gender as social seems useful to
me. It makes "gender is a social construct" a tautology, but doesn't in itself
reject scientific evidence. It's just that inasmuch you have evidence that
some behavior is biologically determined, the behavior is less amenable to
analysis in terms of only gender.

