
Row over AI that 'identifies gay faces' - yawz
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41188560
======
pigscantfly
The press release from GLAAD and HRC is ridiculously misleading. One of their
repeated claims - that the paper has not been peer-reviewed - is directly
contradicted by the first sentence of the first page of the manuscript, and
their other criticisms are similarly baseless. Mistakes that obvious imply to
me that their goal is not an honest debate but rather to stir the pot and
promote misinformation. The alternative is that no one from either
organization read the pre-print with any scrutiny. In my opinion, it's
especially telling that visiting GLAAD's site (including the press release)
prompts an immediate pop-over asking for donations. Who is the unethical actor
here, I wonder...?

Edit: Can anyone downvoting me please stand up and tell me why?

~~~
foldr
The other criticisms seemed perfectly cogent to me. A lot of people just don't
know what "peer reviewed" actually means. I think that is the most likely
cause of the error, rather than malice.

It's pretty normal for charities to encourage donations, so I'm not sure what
your problem is with that. You seem to be hinting at the idea that they have
deliberately released an inaccurate press release to encourage donations, but
there's no reason for them to bother doing that when there are many
uncontroversial instances of homophobia that they could refer to.

~~~
pigscantfly
Thank you for responding. You're right about the donations; I'm sure this pop-
over exists across their site and is not inherently sinister, but including a
call for donations specifically over this divisive, misleading press release
irks me, because it seems to encourage people to wage scientific debate via
lobbying rather than more research, which is the opposite of what the world
needs right now (see: climate change). However, you're right that it's
irrelevant to the actual debate here.

On a more specific note, claims like "The study assumed there were only two
sexual orientations -- gay and straight -- and does not address bisexual
individuals." (without mention that this is addressed in the paper and that
better labels would likely improve results) and repeated hand-waving about
hairstyles (without mention of the sections of the paper devoted to feature
analysis which point to structural facial features giving the strongest signal
to the model) do not present methodological flaws with the study and/or are
misleading. Prof. Kosinski and Yilun Wang have issued a very polite rebuttal
(here)[[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3N...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3NORLoKWdz3big4xuk7Z4/edit)]
which details these and many other weaknesses with the press release. I don't
think it's unreasonable to expect someone at GLAAD or HRC to understand what
peer review means, and in fact, I'm sure they do.

~~~
fleitz
Science isn't about debate, you either falsify the null hypothesis or you
don't.

The last thing an issue like climate change needs is a falsifiable hypothesis
which is why the IPCC never puts one forward.

If we want people to stop driving cars, take shorter showers and do other
progressive things than the last thing we should do is propose something that
could be falsified. It would be as devastating to climate change as the
catholic church putting forth a testable hypothesis for the existence of God.

------
mabbo
I'm inclined to believe that an ML algorithm can do what the authors claim-
but maybe only for the data set they're using.

The inputs are self-submitted photos to a dating website. Can we be certain
that how people pose, smile, look, etc, isn't influenced by their intention-
to find a mate of a specific gender? What if those same people were each asked
to submit a second photo when they're told to 'act gay/straight' in order to
fool the algorithm?

It could be that this ML algorithm is picking up on very different cues than
intended. But I wouldn't discourage the researchers over it- try it again with
a better data set, one built for this purpose, and discover just what the
algorithm is picking up.

~~~
graphitezepp
This particular algorithm is being talked about heavily in the gayer parts of
the internet, and I keep telling everyone precisely this. This is interesting
in as far as it shows that, in the context of trying to attract a partner, gay
and straight people present themselves in quantifiably different ways, which I
suspect most people sufficiently familiar with app dating culture would have
already known.

~~~
vadansky
Again, I hate to keep parroting what another HN said, but I hate to see
misinformation repeated:

The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial
features: [https://osf.io/fk3xr/](https://osf.io/fk3xr/) (page 13) >VGG-Face
aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected
as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation,
image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can
vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for
this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by
VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The
algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all.

Basically, it's not as simple as "All the gay participants had rainbow flags
in the background of their photo so let's ignore this study"

~~~
graphitezepp
This is very interesting thanks for sharing, but I am not sure if it totally
kills my point. I assumed face was isolated from clothing/hairstyle/background
already, but believed facial expression (etc) was the main thing being looked
at. If this VGG-Face tool is sufficiently good at making expression (etc) not
be a factor, this is potentially a huge deal and some of the worries in the
gay community may be justified. Excuse my generic HN skepticism but I will
need to look into how legit VGG-Face is before I start thinking about what
this means.

~~~
daveguy
I don't think it does kill your point. The set of images used in the sample
are obviously biased. They are by people posting pictures they hope to use to
attract others of a certain gender (or genders). Even if it is specifically
taking dimensional measurements surely some facial expressions bias the
dimensions. This could still be the equivalent of a duck-face detector.

------
taneem
What disturbs me is the potential for a government, like in Iran or Russia, to
use this technology to automatically screen and label people, as a precursor
to mass-scale systematic repression.

I get that this study is problematic, but there is no reason to automatically
assume it's not possible. What evidence do we have that there is no
correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality?

~~~
balls187
Doesn't that risk exist for many emergent AI scenarios?

"Bad actors" using AI to influence debate, or writing "fake news" then
promoting it with social media ads, etc?

~~~
bsder
> Doesn't that risk exist for many emergent AI scenarios?

Yes, and it is actually the bigger problem. Facial recognition and license
plate scanners are already producing a "papers, please" situation.

The gay community, however, is more activist and more likely to _fight back_.
Which is why this is getting such traction.

------
claytonjy
I posted this as a reply elsewhere, but I think anyone inclined to believe
this model/study supports the prenatal hormone theory should read this from
Calling Bullshit:
[http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual...](http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual_orientation.html)

The setup and modeling may be perfectly sound, but the conclusions are a big
stretch: they didn't control for intentional differences in presentation (the
data was dating site photos), nor did they appropriately test for significance
of the supposedly subtle facial differences picked up by the model (gay men
having more feminine faces, gay women more masculine ones).

~~~
vadansky
People keep saying this, but as another HN pointed out:

The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial
features: [https://osf.io/fk3xr/](https://osf.io/fk3xr/) (page 13) >VGG-Face
aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected
as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation,
image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can
vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for
this paper by was done logistic regression on the facial features reported by
VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The
algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all.

It's pretty disturbing how quick people are to dismiss papers that make them
uncomfortable, latching onto the first excuse to dismiss it without even
confirming if the excuse is valid or not. Clear Cognitive Dissonance in
action.

~~~
claytonjy
That's a really important point about this not being a novel DNN, but I'm not
sure how it addresses either of the main criticisms from the link I posted.

The first is that claiming this methodology outperforms humans is unfair;
there's no expectation that Turkers are particularly good at identifying
sexuality from photographs, they haven't been able to train in a remotely
analogous way, and there's no comparison to "experts" in orientation
recognition (if those exist).

The second is that the authors of this study use the differences extracted by
VGG-Face to claim support for PHT, despite not applying an appropriate
statistical test to the differences in the features between groups. This is
the bigger scientific misstep in my mind, the willingness to make a strong,
apparently controversial claim (I'm not too familiar with PHT or its history)
without properly validating it.

~~~
dspoka
For your second point, what in your opinion would be the right statistical
test to apply?

------
pavement
I think the signal that the AI bot has identified is very likely to be related
to the effects of differing hormonal exchanges and releases over long periods
of time.

We know that hormonal derivatives like steroids can influence appearance, and
also that ambient secretions offer signaling at a distance among humans, in
circumstances not limited to the synchronization of menstrual cycles, at a
minimum.

Take these factors together, and exclusive close proximity to gender
concentrations based on preference likely results in mild changes in
appearance that automated analysis can determine as a non-zero signal, and
hazard an informed guess with. People are not wrong in claiming that this is a
form of stereotyping, and that sometimes the stereotype will be incorrect.

People may not like it, but just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's
not there.

~~~
sova
Or their dataset is a dating site and they are training a neural net to see
features that are not there. 70-80% accuracy for a neural net is pretty bad if
you have taken a neural networks course. The fact that Stanford students are
publishing this is probably not because it's sound scientifically, but because
ostentatiously riotous subject matter will increase the number of citations
dramatically. Frankly, I don't think it makes sense to infer sexual
orientation based on facial recognition, and I don't think it is sound science
behind any of these findings. Yes, there may be features that imply
correlation one way or the other, but the fact that these features would be
"undetectable by the naked eye but still visually present" leads to all sorts
of murky science that is "based" on neural networks. Also, this sort of
"science" will no doubt be used wrongly to classify people who have not even
investigated their own sexual leanings at all. People will be saying that
their 7 year old has a propensity to be gay or straight based on the length of
their nose? Come now, this is just balderdash and it's no surprise that it's
contentious. Trying to provide some sort of defense for what is clearly just
the Academia version of Clickbait is also a waste of time.

~~~
jamesrcole
It's not clear to me -- your comment seems to contain conflicting statements
-- do you think no correlation could exist between facial characteristics and
sexuality? If you think there might be, do you think no program could ever
detect it?

~~~
sova
To answer your first question: Correlation could exist, but the idea that they
are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my sexual
preference changes. Ponder that for a minute.

Sexuality is not a boolean value, it's not a yes or no, it's not a this or
that, even for people who are attracted to females they are not attracted to
every female, and people who are attracted to males are not attracted to every
male. It's such a silly thing to try and hone in on, because it removes the
primary deciding component of human sexuality from the study: personal,
intimate, real human preference. It's like attempting to discover one's
favorite flavor of bagel shmear based on high school portraits.

You may find some surprising results, realize neural nets are trainable
phenomena, and then run around giving everyone plastic surgery because more
pronounced cheek bones tend to prefer Strawberry Shmear, and if peoples' cheek
bones were adjusted their flavor preference would change.

~~~
jamesrcole
> _To answer your first question: Correlation could exist, but the idea that
> they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my
> sexual preference changes. Ponder that for a minute._

Why couldn't physical features change?

I believe hormone changes can affect appearances, so it doesn't seem beyond
the realm of possibility.

> _Sexuality is not a boolean value, it 's not a yes or no, it's not a this or
> that_

Did it occur to you that possibly the correlation with facial characteristics
could be a matter of degree?

Consider the correlation between facial characteristics and racial background.
I'm half European, half Asian. There's going to be a stronger correlation
between people with near 100% European ancestry and "European facial
characteristics" than people with 50% European ancestry, than people with 25%
European ancestry, etc

~~~
sova
My point is that Sexuality is not classifiable like Eye Color is classifiable,
and we should not treat it as such.

------
netvarun
There was an interesting comment by hn user aub3bhat a while back about the
political pitfalls of facial recognition tech:

"But face recognition is a sensitive/politically-charged topic, I know several
grad students (including me) who inspite of having ready-to-deploy scalable
software and datasets (~10M instagram images) stay away from doing this type
of a demo because reputational risks are enormous. Consider the controversy
around geofeedia etc. The last thing you want as a PhD student is press
interpreting your research incorrectly and blaming you for causing widespread
harm. It happened to a student/professor in my department and even then the
infamous study in question was in collaboration with the social network."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985)

------
alexandercrohde
Worth considering:

I think the reason this topic is so hot is not because of the study, but the
"What if other people use this as a justification for X?" fear.

For example, if it turns out that there are certain physical traits that
predict sexuality, does this imply a physiological component (rather than a
purely psychological one)? If there is a physiological component, I think some
people worry this can be used to "pathologize" alternative sexualities.

However, what if all the endocrine disrupters we're exposed to daily [1] that
act as estrogens play some role in this? What if we make the topic so
unspeakable that we fail to recognize environmental contamination causes both
physical differences [2] and sexual differentiation differences [3]?

This is part of the reason I think we can't reject information that may allow
some socially-backward conclusion. Because we don't know all the other good
things (i.e. medical) that information may be necessary for.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses)
2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans)
3\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons)

------
pfarnsworth
If homosexuality is genetic, which I firmly believe it is, then it's an
interesting question as to whether or not this genetic trait brings with it
other physical manifestations. From a purely scientific point of view, it
would be an interesting test of ML to see if some sort of relationship could
be discovered. It's dangerous though to jump to conclusions that there is a
physical manifestation without reams and reams of scientific study, including
gene sequencing, etc.

However, it's both interesting and dangerous, as the GLAAD press release
states, because of the repercussions to gays in countries where it's not
nearly as accepted. It probably won't stop Russia and other very homophobic
countries from conducting the same experiments using their own datasets.

In addition, very deep research including gene sequencing might inadvertently
turn up the "gay" gene, which would then lead to it's own Pandora's box of
issues.

This might be one of those situations where we might not want to study too
hard because of the repercussions associated with it.

------
tweedledee
Anti-gay stigma is useful to those wishing to exert control over a group via
establishing in-group / out-group dynamics. One can remove a social competitor
from a group by outing them as gay (even if they are not). The fact that it is
capricious and the accusation unfalsifiable is an essential component. A 3rd
party tool that can objective establish gayness would take away the
subjectively. Society will have to move on to other mechanisms of group
control just like we moved on from witchery and heresy.

~~~
sago
We moved on from witchery and heresy by establishing objective criteria for
determining witches and heretics?

(I know you didn't claim we did, just pointing out that your examples don't
seem to support your argument.)

------
program_whiz
Its possible that due to the hormonal and genetic differences in gay vs
straight people, they have slightly different facial structures on average.
Just like people of different genders, despite having very similar genetics,
generally have different faces on average. Whether using this tech on a mass
scale is for good or ill remains to be seen. The tech could be used to
oppress, or it could be used for good.

------
tekromancr
Phrenological Neural Networks

