
Let artificial intelligence guess your attractiveness and age - mkuhn
https://faces.ethz.ch/
======
Dr_tldr
When I put a picture of myself that had the contrast turned up my picture was
rated "godlike", when I put in the original picture it was rated "hot", and
when I turned down the contrast some it was rated "ok." I'm an unhealthy,
almost pasty shade of white with a slightly bulbous nose and a classic
fivehead.

Now, this a problem for bigger reasons:

An older picture of Denzel Washington gets an ok:
[http://imgur.com/Li0gZqH](http://imgur.com/Li0gZqH)

A recent picture of Howard Stern gets a hot:
[http://imgur.com/L8hxoVK](http://imgur.com/L8hxoVK)

Obviously this is just a toy and your algorithm is pretty inexact, but... you
need to fix it, or at least note in giant letters that it only works for white
people right now and that you're working on your algorithm to make it more
universal. Because it only (kinda, sorta?) works for white people right now.
If you claim something is universal in your headline then note its specificity
in the fine print, you're lying. If you build an algorithm that calls most
people who aren't white ugly, you need to think about the buzz-to-backlash
factor of demoing it.

It's really not a good look, and you've got a week at most before you get
called a "Nazi Dating App" on twitter and your potential VCs get spooked and
pull out. I don't think it's intentional on your part, but literally no one
cares about what your intentions are when there's an opportunity to create
moral indignation clickbait. Just a friendly word of warning!

~~~
verroq
If people are not mature enough to understand that a machine learning
algorithm cannot be racist, shouldn't you go educate them instead of telling
people not to offend these idiots?

Secondly what makes you think that every race is equally attractive
universally? Studies have people find people of their own race more
attractive. If whites are more attractive (either by their training set or
user base ratings) doesn't that merely reflect the composition of their user
base?

~~~
Dr_tldr
You have very poor reading comprehension skills, or else you appended your
comment to the wrong post. Almost no part of what you're saying corresponds to
anything that I said.

PS: Giving some solid advice to public-facing startups looking for funding.
Definitely take the autistic high-ground on every issue. Investors don't care
about bad PR, they only care about abstract principles of truth as you
understand them.

~~~
novaleaf
he was reading between the lines. A little too much of course, but people get
pretty race-sensitive when you throw around look comparisons of
black/white/whatever people.

------
sarciszewski
[http://i.imgur.com/Lq648My.png](http://i.imgur.com/Lq648My.png)

Well, there goes my last ounce of self esteem.

If anyone needs me I'll be sitting in the corner with one of those criminal
hacker ski masks while I work on open source stuff.

~~~
minionslave
Get rid of the headphones and try again

~~~
MrQuincle
Of course I tried a bunch of pictures of myself, just as everybody at HN is
doing, ha ha!

I didn't get above the nice level.

First picture of my wife she immediately got the godlike level. Unfair
advantage!!

"Before performing any experiments we removed underage people, anyone over 37
and bi- and homosexual users as these comprise only a small minority of the
dataset."

That's already biasing it of course!

"Interestingly, 44.81% of the male ratings are positive, while only 8.58% of
the female ratings are positive. Due to this strong bias of ratings by women,
we only predict the ratings of men."

So, the algorithm learns to rate me as a heterosexual man?

From:
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07867v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07867v1.pdf)

~~~
timofter
Yes, this was the data we worked with for attractiveness modeling. The
algorithm learns from millions of ratings from males to females and from
females to males, all heterosexuals. No underage or above 37 years old, and
mostly people from Zurich area, Switzerland. For age and gender prediction we
use more and diverse data.

I am Radu Timofte, one of the authors.

~~~
MrQuincle
What did you mean about the bias of the rating by women?

Is it possible that quite a few men rate every women high irrespective of
looks?

Or are women just more picky? Why is it called biased?

~~~
timofter
The ratings are "like" (positive) and "dislike" (negative). If men have
ratings close to uniform distribution (44.81% are "like" ratings, 55.19% are
"dislike"), women with only 8.58% "like" ratings are clearly unbalanced, or if
you want the women are "very picky". We call this a strong bias in the ratings
of women while for men there is a small(er) bias and this only to point out
the difference from the uniform distribution (50%-50%). We can not tell and we
are not the ones to judge if the men are voting randomly or are less picky or
if the women are right or more picky, since the attractiveness is subjective
and we do not have an ultimate ground truth to compare with. We can not say if
the attractiveness should follow a particular distribution, we work
empirically. In our study, the ratings of men tend to agree more and correlate
more with our visual representation based on the face image (looks). We
removed from our data the extreme cases such as users with less than 10
ratings or with too many ratings.

------
rrothe
Hi, I'm Rasmus and worked on the algorithms behind faces.ethz.ch. If you have
any technical questions, let me know! Sorry for having some stability issues,
we got much more traffic than expected and are currently working hard to fix
everything!

~~~
sawwit
From a data privacy point of view I would very much appreciate if you added a
prominent "delete upload" button to the result page.

~~~
rndmind
Yes a "delete" button would nice.

~~~
rrothe
We do not store any photo on the server, so no worries!

~~~
tlrobinson
Well, you could still add a delete button to make people feel better (I'm only
half joking)

~~~
TeMPOraL
And as a potential user I'm only half-insulted.

But seriously, what purpose would it serve over a promise in TOS? A normal
user will trust both (except the button would be bullshitting them). A
privacy-obsessed one will trust neither.

~~~
jmorrow977
You could make a delete button which merely opens a popup to explain that they
do not save it in the first place. That way if they're looking for a delete
button, they'll find it, but it will give them the right information.

------
rubyfan
Startup idea #384826 - _" Does this outfit make me look fat?" As A Service_

~~~
colmvp
I actually thought an interesting idea is an app that recommends you which
dating site to use based on your face.

If you're good looking you can pretty much use whatever.

But for someone like myself who is ethnic and not visually attractive, my
success rate is really low on certain sites and acceptable on certain apps.

For example, my performance on Match (Graphic I made:
[http://i.imgur.com/UZuSzD9.png](http://i.imgur.com/UZuSzD9.png)) was pretty
woeful in December. But I started using another app in the same week and had
much higher success in getting responses relative to effort level.

~~~
danielvinson
I'm curious what worked for you, and if you have any similar data for other
sites? Explaining cultural differences between dating sites/apps is something
that I've tried to do multiple times, but I've never had any data to support
my hypothesis.

~~~
colmvp
So far I've only used Match and CoffeeMeetsBagel.

I've noticed that CMB now only matches me up with Asian women despite the fact
that I'm open to dating any ethnicitiy.

I'll post my CMB stats in another time but unfortunately I can't read
ethnicity/height preferences in the same fashion as I can with Match. It's a
shame because it's really important data in helping me determine whether or
not I should even pursue someone.

But I've bookmarked your name so that I can contact you when I gain a greater
sample size for CMB and Eharmony (which I'll test soon)

------
danso
Obligatory..."what's new?" Especially now that the site's down.

I mean, is it different from Project Oxford, the Microsoft API that's been
around for awhile and is still quite amazing?

[https://www.projectoxford.ai/demo/vision#Analysis](https://www.projectoxford.ai/demo/vision#Analysis)

I actually tried it out early this morning, to compare it with a stock install
of OpenCV 3. It got the faces correct, and the ages very well too.

Here are its guesses for the Star Wars TFA poster:
[http://imgur.com/XT7RmX6](http://imgur.com/XT7RmX6)

Of course, perhaps users have trained it...particularly ones sympathetic to
Carrie Fisher. Though I'd argue that they would've also corrected Boyega's
face.

~~~
stephaniepier
Oh dear - just put my own picture into that and it guessed I was 34 and my
fiance 38...we're 25 and 26.

Edit - tried a different pic, it guessed my fiance was 51.

~~~
danso
Well c'mon, have you really double checked? ;)

Lighting obviously plays an effect, but I was pretty surprised at how it got
TFA's Han Solo down decently well. In the poster, he looks more in his 50s.

Lighting obviously plays a part. I wonder if race does as well? To use the
common stereotype, does the algorithm make a guess if you're Asian, then guess
downwards?

------
m-i-l
See also "What a Deep Neural Network thinks about your #selfie" at
[http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/)
. To summarise the "What makes a good #selfie" section:

\- Be female.

\- Face should occupy about 1/3 of the image.

\- Cut off your forehead.

\- Show your long hair.

\- Oversaturate the face.

\- Put a filter on it.

\- Add a border.

~~~
dghughes
In a mirror in the bathroom or pointing down at you from above your head at an
awkward angle, and duckface lots of duckface.

------
rootedbox
this cat is 31 and is hot
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/50837/483192/6w...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/50837/483192/6wPBVOvlgmAIu7e/upload.png)

~~~
cobalt
well, is it wrong...?

~~~
qbrass
31 cat years is like 3 or 4 human years so it's probably close.

The real question is how old and hot is that popcorn?

------
dpflan
So this is the next more computationally intense evolution of "Hot or Not"?

~~~
sharemywin
crowd sourcing is out and AI is in...

~~~
mkuhn
Today you use the crowd to train an AI...

~~~
visarga
I'd still rely on crowds directly rather than AI. I don't think AI is as
accurate. You can post your photos on OkCupid and a crowd of people will rate
them and help you select the best. Of course, you pay for this service by
rating pictures of strangers.

------
hazelhandanza
I have a heart shaped face, a slight hawk nose, green eyes, golden hair,
freckles on my cheeks, I have light skin, my forehead is an average length, my
eyebrows are medium sized, and my teeth are straight

------
chrisdevereux
Very brave of you to put the founder photos on the front page...

~~~
nmstoker
You've got to admire their honesty for not putting an image matching algorithm
in to automatically say the founders are hot!
[https://goo.gl/photos/jv82LHNQKxrt1Ce88](https://goo.gl/photos/jv82LHNQKxrt1Ce88)

~~~
chrisdevereux
I wonder if they were included in the training set...

------
acconrad
Does anyone else find it funny that the photo of Jesus didn't rank as Godlike?

~~~
thomasahle
Can't have been what the painter was going for...

------
dholowiski
Well, it was way off on my age, but it correctly gendered me ad female. Which
I find quite impressive as I am a transgender woman, I've only been on
hormones for 4 months, and most humans aren't even correctly gendering in me
yet.

More than anything, I'm curious to know what features it was that registered
me as female. Was it as simple as the long hair, or some complicated subtle
mix of many small details?

~~~
amyjess
I've been on hormones for a little over two years now. Submitted several
pictures from the last few months: it's consistently gendering me female
(yay!) and a decade younger than I actually am (yay!), but it's saying that
I'm ice cold "Hmm" (aw...).

What direction was it off on your age? I'm 31 (30 in the older pictures I
sent), and it said I was 19-22 in all the pictures I tried.

------
sethbannon
This would make a great psychology experiment. Use an algorithm to detect
someone's age, then randomly assign them an attractiveness score and see how
their behavior differs based on the result. How does the random attractiveness
result effect how likely they are to share their score? To retake the test?
Does this vary based on the users age?

~~~
timofter
Hi sethbannon,

I am Radu, one of the authors.

We thought at similar experiments, however psychology is not our expertise. If
you check our paper on hotness/attractiveness
([http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~timofter/publications/Rothe-
ar...](http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~timofter/publications/Rothe-
arXiv-2015.pdf)), I am sure that you'll find some interesting results on how
different age-grouped people rate, a paradox, and more. And yes, there are
many interesting experiments to do and questions to answer.

------
JimboOmega
As someone who switches genders I find that it guesses my trans flavor right
fairly often - maybe 75% of the time. It always gets my cis flavor right.

Also, the ones it rates the least attractive it, for some reason, tends to
identify me as much younger (across both genders). Like more than a decade
younger than the picture, and it'll rate it "Hmm..."

As for the highest rated pictures... I can't figure out what it does; though
one where someone else did my makeup and it was _perfect_ was among the two it
rated stunning. I was surprised that the ones I tried to feed it where my
phone's "Beauty face" kicked in (which removes most wrinkles and skin flaws)
didn't seem to rate any higher... though makeup did make a difference.

A fun little toy.

Edit: Oh, and other than occasionally docking me a decade as mentioned, it was
pretty accurate on age (+-3 years, generally). Which I find interesting as I'm
frequently told I look younger than I am.

~~~
amyjess
31-year-old trans MTF here... uploaded my most recent picture, and it said I
was 20, female, and ice cold "Hmm...".

Uploaded a picture from about a month ago... same, except it said I was 19.

Well, I'm flattered it thinks I can't drink, and I'm glad I pass. Too bad it
doesn't think I'm hot, but I've always preferred to go for cute over hot
anyway.

I'm gonna dig through my photos and see how consistent this is... (edit: a
couple more, 21-22, female, and still ice cold)

~~~
JimboOmega
As an example (both me, and I'm in my early 30s): 24, "Hmm...":
[http://imgur.com/V1AMDfd](http://imgur.com/V1AMDfd) 27, "Stunning":
[http://imgur.com/bmmJ2dg](http://imgur.com/bmmJ2dg)

I'm actually a year younger in the second picture than the first. Maybe it's
the glasses?

~~~
irremediable
Any chance of seeing a photo of you in guymode that it recognises as being in
guymode?

In its defence, you do look very different in those photos. I wouldn't
recognise you as the same person. That said, I'm surprised that it ranked you
so poorly in the first photo.

~~~
JimboOmega
Sure.

27/Hot: [http://imgur.com/mHpvd5j](http://imgur.com/mHpvd5j) 36/Nice:
[http://imgur.com/a2IKkRD](http://imgur.com/a2IKkRD) 30/Ok:
[http://imgur.com/Vicvbq3](http://imgur.com/Vicvbq3)

First is a year and half old, the other two are within the last couple months.

~~~
irremediable
I don't know how much better this thing is than doing: IF detect_face THEN
random_guess()

That said, I think I'd agree with its ordering of those photos. _shrug_

------
Madmallard
It says I'm either stunning or hot in the 4 photos I tried. Is that real? I
don't really get oogled by women or anything like that.

[http://imgur.com/Td11aoI](http://imgur.com/Td11aoI)

Yeah this site is bogus. So many inconsistent ratings.

~~~
bcook
Humans are inconsistent as well. We also use attributes beyond looks.

Anyone tried a picture with larged amounts of cash in the background?

------
madaxe_again
I'm "hmmm" and 55, apparently. "Hmmm" I'll agree with, but I'm 32!

------
amelius
Is this a test for my attractiveness or for the AI?

------
tsumnia
Oh hey, I worked on something similar two years ago:
[http://www.FaceMyAge.com](http://www.FaceMyAge.com) (note, the age estimator
has been taken offline - because, 2 years ago).

A lot of the issues our estimator (just an age estimator) ran into were the
standard face recognition problems: occlusion, lighting, and (the obvious)
bogus images.

Anyone involved, what data set was the attractiveness scale built
from(Labelled Faces in the Wild Dataset ([http://vis-
www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/)](http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/\)))?

~~~
timofter
Hi tsumnia,

I am Radu, one of the authors.

After 2 years we face almost the same issues, but probably we cope differently
with them. Note that our solutions are fully described in the two papers
mentioned on our faces.ethz.ch page. For attractiveness we used data from
Blinq.

Our apparent age estimation solution is the winner of the latest LAP
challenge, ICCV 2015.

------
AnimalMuppet
And why, exactly, am I supposed to care about how attractive an AI thinks I
am?

------
redwards510
It said I am 36 and I am 37. I am impressed (and Hot(tm))! However, it guessed
a coworker was 34/Ummm and she is in her 50s. I am conflicted about telling
her the results.

------
nikolay
A side question: Is there a service/project that can identify features of a
person by feeding it various photos of that person? Examples:

\- body type

\- piercing

\- tattoos

\- eyeglasses

\- colored hair

\- etc.

------
freddealmeida
This fails for Asian faces. Tested it on a picture of Bing Bing (Chinese
Actress) that is absolutely stunning. She got a "Nice" rating. This is a toy.

Check out how Sensetime did a similar feature.

~~~
nice_byte
They said it themselves - "Our algorithm is trained on the pictures of the
BLINQ community that is mainly based in Switzerland. In other parts of the
world the perception might be very different."

------
tripity
A service that upvotes average to below average white people and downvotes
average to above average people of color. Is someone anticipating a decline in
the international value of Whiteness?

------
Houshalter
A lot of the sample photos look like they have had filters put on them. One of
the things that karpathy found was that convnets were bad at images with
filters.

Anyway I only got "connection error".

------
pmelendez
Did we break it? I can't upload pictures anymore.

------
colmvp
Plus: The algorithm thought I was 24 years old. I'm actually 32.

Minus: I got the lowest rating possible. Haha, terribly depressing feedback
before a date.

~~~
nilkn
Don't feel too bad -- I ran a photo of Brad Pitt through it and he merely got
a "Nice". Granted, I tried a second one and he got "Godlike". I wonder how
sensitive the results are to general lighting in the photo.

~~~
colmvp
I think ethnicity does play some role too (which maybe works with the lighting
hypothesis?).

I put pictures of really attractive Asian guys (specifically men who honestly
have a lot of diehard female fans who are interested in them) and at best they
got "Nice"

~~~
analyst74
This is actually a very interesting effect -- it exposes opinions people are
generally not comfortable at expressing, for fear of being labeled as racist
or something.

Sadly, asian guys are considered much less attractive than our female
counterparts in Switzerland.

On a more positive note, now I know if a swiss girl likes me, she's probably
not superficial. lol

------
Zekio
It was only off by 1 year on my age, and apparently my own opinion is the same
as it's opinion ha ha which isn't very good ha ha

------
peter303
Reminds of the those State fair booths where the guy tries to guess your age.
[http://blog.syracuse.com/cny/2013/08/your_age_weight_and_bir...](http://blog.syracuse.com/cny/2013/08/your_age_weight_and_birth_month_are_fair_game_for_the_guesser_at_the_new_york_state_fair.html)

------
shouldbelinear
I put Mona Lisa and she is second lowest rating. I mean, this is next door to
random generator.

~~~
sawwit
It possibly associates the painting texture with poor skin health.

------
the-13-doctor
To be honest this thing seems to be most attuned to Euro centric features.

------
thegayngler
Well that made me feel good. I'm way older than they suggested.

------
tapia
Wow! It missed my age for only 1 year (on the good side :P)!!

------
microcolonel
I think this thing is all over the place.

[http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=97312](http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=97312)
Off by almost a decade on age.

------
nnoitra
It's not a lot more precise than randomly guessing.

Check this album out: [http://imgur.com/a/1a1tn](http://imgur.com/a/1a1tn)

Seems racist and sexist towards men.

~~~
timofter
Please check our research papers linked on the webpage.

Our data consists only from normal (or natural looking) face images in the
wild (from IMDB, Wiki, and/or BLINQ user profiles). On such data we get very
good apparent age prediction (better than the human reference) and also very
good gender and attractiveness prediction.

The attractiveness is highly subjective and its perception varies from one
culture/region to another. We used data from Switzerland.

Our solutions are far from being perfect and the guessed results should not be
taken too seriously.

We consider to update our models to explicitly deal with distortions and non-
human face contents.

------
baltcode
popup says: Sorry, we're currently under heavy load and can't handle your
hotness. Please try again later.

------
totony
I didn't know I was a girl until now!

------
iLoch
So this was getting slammed by reddit, and you decided to post it here as
well? These poor developers.

------
Jess_the_best
looks fun

------
CrowFly
I uploaded a photo of my (male) personal trainer. It got it exactly right. Age
26 and "stunning."

------
_asdf_asdf
It no worky?

------
kelvin0
Finally, it's good to see we are using that AI research for the advancement of
mankind. If anything this will help procreation?

