Someone made gaydar · 3:47am Sep 8th, 2017
From the article in The Economist:
When shown one photo each of a gay and straight man, both chosen at random, the model distinguished between them correctly 81% of the time. When shown five photos of each man, it attributed sexuality correctly 91% of the time. The model performed worse with women, telling gay and straight apart with 71% accuracy after looking at one photo, and 83% accuracy after five. In both cases the level of performance far outstrips human ability to make this distinction. Using the same images, people could tell gay from straight 61% of the time for men, and 54% of the time for women. This aligns with research which suggests humans can determine sexuality from faces at only just better than chance.
Composite faces:
FYI, it is a little less impressive than it sounds, though:
When asked to select the 100 males most likely to be gay, only 47 of those chosen by the system actually were, meaning that the system ranked some straight men as more likely to be gay than men who actually are.
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.
I'm curious how generalizable this is, but it is certainly an interesting if kind of pointless application of expert programs.
I hear they're working on one for changelings next. Not that anyone here has to worry about that, right?
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NB4 Horizon joke
Why would changelings care if we can tell which ones are gay?
Would It Matter If I Was, though?
4661757
I don't know, but there are 18 spinoff fics to help you find the answer!
Please let this be the next stupid meme.
What I find the most interesting about this is how much sympathetic I find the gay woman vs the straight one, just based on that composite face.
Other than that, not surprising.
Oh dear. xD Amusing and stupid indeed, though I'm sure they can argue passionately that there's merit to it.
Looking at the composites, it's easy to see that the differences are more cultural than biological, at least in the case of men. The straight men average out to a classic masculine look: bearded, gormless, slightly overweight. Me, in other words. The gay men, in contrast, are thinner and more pretty, taking more care over their appearance.
As a result, I'm unconvinced that this model would extend to the broader population or other cultures.
There's another factor to consider. From the article:
That means these aren't random pictures; these are the pictures that people chose to upload in order to appeal to their chosen orientation. In other words, the AI has been taught to reproduce human preconceptions, not reality.