The computer that can tell if somebody is gay by looking at their photo
A COMPUTER program can tell with up to 91 per cent accuracy if someone is gay or not by analysing a photo, a study claims.
The artificial intelligence system can detect subtle differences in facial structure that the human eye struggles to pick up, the authors claim.
To ‘train’ their computer, the researchers downloaded 130,741 images of 36,630 men’s faces, and 170,360 of 38,593 women from a US dating website. All had declared their sexuality on their profiles.
Removing images that were not clear enough, the researchers were left with 35,326 pictures of 14,776 men and women.
Digitally scanning contours of the face, cheekbones, nose and chin, the software made numerous measurements of the ratios Test: The software in action between different facial features. It then logged which ones were more likely to appear in gay people than those who were straight.
Once the patterns associated with homosexuality were learnt, the system was shown faces it had not processed before. It was tested with pictures of pairs of men, one gay and one straight. When shown five photos of each man, it correctly selected sexuality 91 per cent of the time, the authors claim in The Economist.
It performed worse with women, telling gay and straight apart with 71 per cent accuracy from one photo, and 83 per cent from five.
In both cases the level of performance outstripped human ability to make the distinction. Using the same images, human viewers could tell gay from straight 61 per cent of the time for men, and 54 per cent of the time for women.
The machine could also guess accurately the sexuality of people who had not declared their sexuality on the dating website.
Critics say that in the wrong hands it could be used to ‘out’ men and women who would prefer to keep their sexuality confiden- tial. Google search results show that the term ‘is my husband gay?’ is more common than ‘is my husband having an affair’ or ‘is my husband depressed’. In a leading article, The Economist warned: ‘In countries where homosexuality is a crime, software which promises to infer sexuality from a face is an alarming prospect.’
Researchers Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang at Stanford University in California will soon publish their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Offering an explanation of how the software works, they say that in the womb, hormones such as testosterone affect the developing bone structure of the foetus.
They suggest these same hormones have a role in determining sexuality and that the software is able to pick these signs out.
Dr Kosinski previously developed an app that could model people’s personalities from their Facebook profiles. This was used by Donald Trump’s election campaign team to target voters.
‘An alarming prospect’