Artificial intelligence can accurately guess whether people are gay or straight based on photos of their faces, according to new research that suggests machines can have significantly better \u201cgaydar\u201d than humans. <\/p>\n
The study<\/a> from Stanford University \u2013 which found that a computer algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women \u2013 has raised questions about the biological origins of sexual orientation, the ethics of facial-detection technology, and the potential for this kind of software to violate people\u2019s privacy or be abused for anti-LGBT purposes.<\/p>\n
The machine intelligence tested in the research, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and first reported in the Economist<\/a>, was based on a sample of more than 35,000 facial images that men and women publicly posted on a US dating website. The researchers, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, extracted features from the images using \u201cdeep neural networks\u201d, meaning a sophisticated mathematical system that learns to analyze visuals based on a large dataset.<\/p>\n
The research found that gay men and women tended to have \u201cgender-atypical\u201d features, expressions and \u201cgrooming styles\u201d, essentially meaning gay men appeared more feminine and vice versa. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women.<\/p>\n
Human judges performed much worse than the algorithm, accurately identifying orientation only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. When the software reviewed five images per person, it was even more successful \u2013 91% of the time with men and 83% with women. Broadly, that means \u201cfaces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain\u201d, the authors wrote.<\/p>\n