Dangerous BS Science

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Hi all,

i just found this disturbing link in a daily digest of science type stuff.

Can AI detect homosexuality from a facial image? And should it?

http://newatlas.com/ai-detects-gay-faces-criticisms-study/51...

if not wearing makeup marks a woman as lesbian then there are 70 + lesbians married to men in my local classic car club who knew (scarcasm there fyi)

Possibly

I've seen reports about this on several reputable sites. Whether the underlying facts support this conclusion I don't know. I would want to see a lot of peer-reviewed studies before I could make my mind up. Considering this as an offshoot of facial recognition technology it does seem possible.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Why would someone develop something like this?

I don't know which is scarier: If it's accurate or if it isn't. The potential for abuse of something like this is staggering even if it were 100% accurate. I can already see well meaning people separating out every child this thing flags as gay in elementry school for special "What it means to be gay" classes. Not to mention how it can be used by no-so-well meaning people to discriminate. And add in the possibilities for false positives... . Imagine this in countries where homosexuality is illegal, or in the hands of certain religious fundamentalists. Or politicians looking to smear their opponents. Or people trying to extort/blackmail other people.

This is a perfect example of "Just because you can do or create something doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it." I can't image a single positive use for this, except maybe as further evidence that homosexuality is definitely biological in nature, and not a "lifestyle choice". Even with a poor accuracy rate, people are going to believe it because "The computer says you're gay, so you MUST be. After all, the computer is never wrong." I really hope this thing never exists outside of Stanford's labs.

LittleOne

There is absolutely...

No way this thing is even remotely close to the kind of accuracy rate that would be required for any use. As for "the computer is never wrong" bullshit some people actually believe, no, computers are frequently wrong. Even when there are no bugs in the code or the circuitry, there can be no greater accuracy inside a computer system than that supplied to it by a human. And we already know how fallible we humans are!

AI, specifically, is actually a form of high speed pattern recognition programming. At least, this type of AI is. Video game AI seldom has pattern recognition, while it does always have decision trees, which this type of AI never has. They are very different things, btw.

Who sets the patterns that the AI is intended to recognize and classify? Humans do, that's who. And as proven by every time this type of AI is used to do something thought to be innocent, it gets corrupted by us humans quickly. We all remember the Nazi chat bot, I hope?

This, unlike those situations, is even worse: it had badly preconceived human thinking corrupting the project from the very beginning. Makeup? Seriously?! A lot of women don't wear makeup. Most of them aren't doing so because they're lesbian. And a lot of lesbians DO wear makeup. Jeezus.

Abigail Drew.

Amen

Patricia Marie Allen's picture

As for "the computer is never wrong" bullshit -- I'm sure that all the techies here will attest GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Hugs
Patricia

Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann

Yep

It's very logical. Just like small hands have a high correlation with a small penis (or no penis). And, just like people with small penises frequently over-compensate by building large phallic symbols named after themselves. You see it every day, unfortunately.

Seriously . . . what does it mean to be gay? Isn't that just one more stupid binary word that can only be defined by the individual.

If the computer identifies a person as "gay" it might mean "partially gay" and will be right most of the time. My guess is that a surprisingly large number of men would consider having sex with Robert Pattinson. I also believe a very large percentage of women would bed Jennifer Lawrence.

Actually, I like bits of this science. I would gladly accept that there is a tie between genetics and homosexuality as suggested by this study. But -- the Bible thumpers won't buy into that.

Jill

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

When I was in college

I made friends with this one guy, who dressed in colors and fashion that you would expect of someone openly gay, his speech pattern and words used were quite feminine. He even walked like a woman and carried his book like a woman.

Why did he have such feminine mannerisms? All his role models growing up were female. His father died when he was very small and he grew up with 5 older sisters and his mother. It had nothing to do with his sexual preference, which by the way was completely heterosexual.

We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

From reading over this, it's

From reading over this, it's more bad science. No "control" group of bisexual, asexual, pansexual, etc. It's not a binary world out there guys.

Not as scary as it looks

Beoca's picture

I recall reading somewhere else that the software did not perform anywhere near as well when the ratio of homosexual people to heterosexual people was closer to reality (the high accuracy figures are solely for a 1:1 ratio, which is FAR higher than the actual ratio outside the lab).

Macedonia fake news center.

Influencing the 2020 US election.

I just did read a story on BBC (?) I think about a small town in Macedonia that is the "center" of Fake NEWS, according to them. Unfortunately, lots of so called legitimate news services seem fall for their evil ploys and they apparently make just lots of money concocting Fake Newsies. Apparently these sites somehow make money every time someone clicks on their stories.

Please do not miss the fact that my comment is tightly laced with cynicism and sarcasm.

Considering how bad the new

Considering how bad the new iphone facial recognition software is not likely that this would work on a large scale