The famo AI gaydar study was repeated – and, no, n't tell if you're straight or not jt om your face • The Register

Contents:

• ROW OVER AI THAT 'INTIFI GAY FAC'
• THIS PSYCHOLOGIST’S “GAYDAR” REARCH MAK UNFORTABLE. THAT’S THE POT.
• FACIAL HTS SHARPEN PEOPLE'S 'GAYDAR'
• THE FAMO AI GAYDAR STUDY WAS REPEATED – AND, NO, N'T TELL IF YOU'RE STRAIGHT OR NOT JT OM YOUR FACE
• 'I WAS SHOCKED WAS SO EASY': ​MEET THE PROFSOR WHO SAYS FACIAL REGNN ​​N TELL IF YOU'RE GAY
• ARTIFICIAL TELLIGENCE N INTIFY 'GAY FAC' OM A PICTURE, STUDY CLAIMS
• HRC AND GLAAD RELEASE A SILLY STATEMENT ABOUT THE ‘GAY FACE’ STUDY
• WHY STANFORD REARCHERS TRIED TO CREATE A ‘GAYDAR’ MACHE
• WHILE STRAIGHT MEN FACE TNAL CRISIS, GAY MEN EXCEL AMILLY, STUDY FDS

ROW OVER AI THAT 'INTIFI GAY FAC'

Image source, Stanford UniversyImage ptn, The study created pose fac judged most and least likely to belong to homosexualsA facial regnn experiment that claims to be able to distguish between gay and heterosexual people has sparked a row between s creators and two leadg LGBT rights Stanford Universy study claims s software regnis facial featur relatg to sexual orientatn that are not perceived by human work has been acced of beg "dangero" and "junk science" the scientists volved say the are "knee-jerk" reactns. Details of the peer-reviewed project are due to be published the Journal of Personaly and Social jawsFor their study, the rearchers traed an algorhm g the photos of more than 14, 000 whe Amerins taken om a datg ed between one and five of each person's pictur and took people's sexualy as self-reported on the datg rearchers said the rultg software appeared to be able to distguish between gay and heterosexual men and women. In one tt, when the algorhm was prented wh two photos where one picture was fely of a gay man and the other heterosexual, was able to terme which was which 81% of the women, the figure was 71%.

"But their software did not perform as well other suatns, cludg a tt which was given photos of 70 gay men and 930 heterosexual asked to pick 100 men "most likely to be gay" missed 23 of s summary of the study, the Enomist - which was first to report the rearch - poted to several "limatns" cludg a ncentratn on whe Amerins and the e of datg se pictur, which were "likely to be particularly revealg of sexual orientatn". "This rearch isn't science or news, but 's a scriptn of bety standards on datg s that ignor huge segments of the LGBTQ (lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr and queer/qutng) muny, cludg people of lour, transgenr people, olr dividuals, and other LGBTQ people who don't want to post photos on datg s, " said Jim Halloran, chief digal officer of Glaad, a media-monorg body. "The 'subtle' differenc uld be a nsequence of gay and straight people choosg to portray themselv systematilly different ways, rather than differenc facial appearance self, " said Prof Benedict Jon, who ns the Face Rearch Lab at the Universy of was also important, he said, for the technil tails of the analysis algorhm to be published to see if they stood up to rmed cricism.

Whout beg aware of , most people n accurately intify gay men by face aloneAlthough I've always wanted this particular superhuman power, I've never been very good at tectg other men's sexual orientatn.

THIS PSYCHOLOGIST’S “GAYDAR” REARCH MAK UNFORTABLE. THAT’S THE POT.

"Th, " the thors wrote, "by g photos of gay and straight dividuals that they themselv did not post, we were able to remove the fluence of self-prentatn and much of the potential selectn bias that may be prent photos om personal advertisements. And even wh the more strgent ntrols, the participants were able to intify the gay fac at levels greater than chance—aga even on those trials where the fac were flickered on the screen for a mere 50 lisends.

FACIAL HTS SHARPEN PEOPLE'S 'GAYDAR'

For example, when shown only the eye regn ("whout brows and cropped to the outer nthi so that not even "crow's-feet" were visible"), perceivers were amazgly still able to accurately intify a man as beg gay. "A man, ually homosexual, wh a distctly effete facial stcture wh some very specific featur; a strong jawle [sic] that lacks promence, space between the ey that rell people wh down syndrome [sic], and a slopg, long forehead. Now, that one's rather silly and sensatnalized—even polilly spect—and there's certaly no scientific evince support of the claims about the "mongoloid" featur of homosexual men's fac.

More ntroversially, Kosski and Wang’s paper claimed that the program based s cisn on differenc facial stcture; that gay men’s fac were more feme and lbian women’s fac were more mascule.

THE FAMO AI GAYDAR STUDY WAS REPEATED – AND, NO, N'T TELL IF YOU'RE STRAIGHT OR NOT JT OM YOUR FACE

A smart person wh a puter and accs to the ter n judge sexual orientatn of anyone the world, or lns of people simultaneoly wh very ltle effort, which mak liv of homophob and opprsive regim jt a ty b more easy. People n judge wh surprisg accuracy whether someone is gay or straight — even when they're lookg at a black-and-whe photograph, cropped of hair and intifyg marks, and prented upsi fdgs om a Universy of Washgton study suggt people e a batn of clu om dividual facial featur and om the way those featur f together to make snap judgments about sexual orientatn, said rearcher Joshua Tabak, a graduate stunt psychology.

But even upsi down, people are good at procsg dividual facial and his -thor exploed this quirk of the bra by prentg photographs of 111 gay men, 122 straight men, 87 gay women and 93 straight women to 129 stunt volunteers. "It's really tertg to speculate that there might be this ironic effect that bee we're more faiar wh the ncept of gay men [ the media], maybe we're more liberal wh labelg a man gay.

That suggts both facial featur (which n be procsed upsi-down and right-si-up photos) and facial nfiguratn provi hts to orientatn, the rearchers report Wednday (May 16) the journal PLoS remas to be seen how or if people e "gaydar" real life, when they have more to go on than a glimpse of a photograph, Tabak said. Th, our rults showed that differenc facial morphology of homosexual and heterosexual men do not simply mirror variatn femy, and the stereotypic associatn of feme lookg men as homosexual may nfound judgments of sexual orientatn. Unsurprisgly, that origal work kicked up a massive fs at the time, wh many skeptil that puters, which have zero knowledge or unrstandg of somethg as plex as sexualy, uld really predict whether someone was gay or straight om their fizzog.

'I WAS SHOCKED WAS SO EASY': ​MEET THE PROFSOR WHO SAYS FACIAL REGNN ​​N TELL IF YOU'RE GAY

The Stanford eggheads behd that first rearch – Yilun Wang, a graduate stunt, and Michal Kosski, an associate profsor – even claimed that not only uld nral works ss out a person’s sexual orientatn, algorhms had an even better gaydar than humans. “Moreover, this entire le of thought is premised on the ia that there is value to be gaed workg out why 'gay face' classifiers might work – value further scribg, fg and settg out the methodology for any tpot dictator or bigot wh a puter who might want to opprs queer people.

ARTIFICIAL TELLIGENCE N INTIFY 'GAY FAC' OM A PICTURE, STUDY CLAIMS

Weeks after his trip to Mosw, Kosski published a ntroversial paper which he showed how face-analysg algorhms uld distguish between photographs of gay and straight people. ”In a paper published last year, Kosski and a Stanford puter scientist, Yilun Wang, reported that a mache-learng system was able to distguish between photos of gay and straight people wh a high gree of accuracy. Prented wh two pictur – one of a gay person, the other straight – the algorhm was traed to distguish the two 81% of s volvg imag of men and 74% of photographs of women.

’ Photograph: Jason Henry/The GuardianNeher did many other people, and there was an immediate backlash when the rearch – dubbed “AI gaydar” – was previewed the Enomist magaze.

HRC AND GLAAD RELEASE A SILLY STATEMENT ABOUT THE ‘GAY FACE’ STUDY

) There was also anger that Kosski had nducted rearch on a technology that uld be ed to persecute gay people untri such as Iran and Sdi Arabia, where homosexualy is punishable by ath. His fdgs are nsistent wh the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientatn, he says, which argu that the levels of androgens foet are exposed to the womb help terme whether people are straight or gay. The startlg gree of accuracy achieved by the algorhm has been qutned by some and acced as dangero by the ntroversial study, the rearchers traed a nral work on over 35, 000 facial imag, evenly spl between gay and heterosexual.

Gay men, however, tend to have narrower jaws, longer nos, larger foreheads, and ls facial hair, " wr one of the thors of the study Michal Kosski, not recently published fendg his work. "When prented wh randomly selected pairs of imag, featurg one homosexual man and one heterosexual man, the mache accurately picked the sexual orientatn of each subject 81 percent of the time.

WHY STANFORD REARCHERS TRIED TO CREATE A ‘GAYDAR’ MACHE

One the left is are male and female pose imag of what the algorhm termed to be heterosexual while on the right are the male/female homosexual pose imagMichal Kosski and Yilun Wang. "Image for a moment the potential nsequenc if this flawed rearch were ed to support a btal regime's efforts to intify and/or persecute people they believed to be gay, " says HRC Director of Public Edutn and Rearch, Ashland Johnson. Acrdg to s thors, who say they were "really disturbed" by their fdgs, the accuracy of an AI system n reach 91 per cent for homosexual men and 83 per cent for homosexual study also nclus that homosexual men and women tend to have “genr-atypil facial morphology, exprsn, and groomg styl”.

However, only whe participants were volved the study, as the rearchers “uld not fd sufficient numbers of non-whe gay participants”, and also didn't take to acunt transgenr or bisexual people. When the system was prented wh one picture of a homosexual man and a picture of a heterosexual man, the rearchers say rrectly ranked the gay man as “more likely to be gay” 81 per cent of the time.

WHILE STRAIGHT MEN FACE TNAL CRISIS, GAY MEN EXCEL AMILLY, STUDY FDS

”It also strsed that the fdgs don’t imply that “all gay men are more feme than all heterosexual men, or that there are no gay men wh extremely mascule facial featur (and vice versa the se of lbians)”, and mt not be rearchers say that homosexual men were found to have narrower jaws, longer nos, larger foreheads and ls facial hair than heterosexual men, and that homosexual women tend to have larger jaws and smaller foreheads than heterosexual women. "Acrdg to the rearchers, the study has exposed a potential threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women around the world, as ernments and rporatns are already velopg and ployg facial regnn technologi signed to predict thgs like the likelihood of mtg a crime or beg a paedophile. Yterday I posted about a study by two Stanford Universy rearchers, Michal Kosski and Yilun Wang, that found that a puter program uld assign a probabily that someone is gay or straight wh a surprisg level of accuracy, jt based on a picture of their face.

HRC’s Ashland Johnson, the exact same statement as GLAAD, cid to make a ntradictory argument about the study: “Image for a moment the potential nsequenc if this flawed rearch were ed to support a btal regime’s efforts to intify and/or persecute people they believed to be gay. Thk about : we generally agree that someone n e out as gay before they have sex (so behavr isn’t the standard), and “g out” – as opposed to “beg gay” – impli that sexual orientatn exists penntly of someone’s inty.

It is not surprisg that gay people (out, whe, siar age) who choose to go on datg s post photos of themselv wh siar exprsns and hairstyl (one of the characteristics acrdg to the study). HRC and GLAAD have to go one step further and show not jt that “gay people (out, whe, siar age) who choose to go on datg s” look siar to each other, but that they look more siar to each other than straight people who are “(out, whe, siar age) who choose to go on datg s. They might be right that this sample of gay people is abnormally more siar to each other than to gay people general than a parable sample of straight people is to straight people general, but ’s reasonable for Wang and Kosski to proceed wh a study anyway.