'I was shocked was so easy': ​meet the profsor who says facial regnn ​​n tell if you're gay | Artificial telligence (AI) | The Guardian

Contents:

• 'I WAS SHOCKED WAS SO EASY': ​MEET THE PROFSOR WHO SAYS FACIAL REGNN ​​N TELL IF YOU'RE GAY
• GAY AND STRAIGHT MEN MAY HAVE DIFFERENT FACIAL SHAP, NEW STUDY SUGGTS
• 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
• GAYS VS. STRAIGHTS: ANY DIFFERENC SEXUAL SATISFACTN?
• WHILE STRAIGHT MEN FACE TNAL CRISIS, GAY MEN EXCEL AMILLY, STUDY FDS

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

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. In an ial experiment, rearchers Nicholas Rule and Nali Ambady om Tufts Universy pesed onle datg s and refully selected 45 straight male fac and 45 gay male fac.

GAY AND STRAIGHT MEN MAY HAVE DIFFERENT FACIAL SHAP, NEW STUDY SUGGTS

The 90 fac were then shown to 90 participants random orr, who were asked simply to judge the target's "probable sexual orientatn" (gay or straight) by prsg a button.

"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.

FACIAL HTS SHARPEN PEOPLE'S 'GAYDAR'

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. 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.

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

I was cur enough about Rule's fdgs to look up "gay face" the Urban Dictnary, a popular Web se that offers rmal, er-ntributed fns of everyday (often crass) saygs. "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.

For example, gay face clus tightns around the mouth om pursg the lips, a facial exprsn mon to gay men and women—but not to heterosexual men. For example, the send experiment, participants uld still ferret out the gay face when shown the eye regn sans eyebrows and cropped to the outer nthi.

GAYS VS. STRAIGHTS: ANY DIFFERENC SEXUAL SATISFACTN?

(For example, one of my PhD stunts, David Harnn-Warwick, has a sual hunch that gay men may have sharper, clearer iris than straight men. It was only a few years ago that rearchers disvered that, unlike straight men, gay men tend to have hair whorl patterns that n a unterclockwise directn. 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.

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

) 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. Sign up for a full digt of all the bt opns of the week our Voic Dispatch emailSign up to our ee weekly Voic newsletterA new study analysg the facial differenc between homosexual and heterosexual men has found "signifint morphologil differenc".