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I would really hope that they don't publish more information and keep algorithms as secret as possible. Algorithms like this can have huge implications in count
by dx034 9y ago
I would really hope that they don't publish more information and keep algorithms as secret as possible. Algorithms like this can have huge implications in countries where homosexuality is banned. If this really works, people could end up in jail just because a neural network determines that they look gay. And even if it doesn't work, some governments or local communities could still use it to ban people because of the chance that they're gay.
While I'm not a fan of censoring research, I think this is a case where the research community should refrain from publishing results that could help replicating such algorithms.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't say that this study makes sense or works. But there are areas where large parts of the population really hate homosexuality. Just thinking this could work can make them use such a system. Especially in situations where you can afford false positives. So next time you want to travel to a country it could happen that they don't let you in because the algorithm says that you're likely gay.
- rem1313 9y agoIt wouldn't take long for a government to replicate the study even if it is not published if it is sufficiently interested
- speedplane 9y agoGetting a prototype working would take a week for a skilled machine learning engineer, assuming they had access to well labeled tagged data. What will be difficult is to push the accuracy up to get actionable information from it. Assuming you're an evil repressive regime, even if you're system had 90% accuracy, you'd be falsely accusing a huge number of people and doubt even a repressive homophobic regime would implement it. Getting that 90% accuracy to 99.9% or higher would take a huge effort, this study isn't anywhere close. That said, the concerns are real. Automatically sorting hetero from homosexual people, Jews from Christians, or even black from white comes with a tone of moral issues.
- peteretep 9y agoGetting buy-in from an evil repressive regime will be hard if we assume they have a population distribution like anyone else which means a sizeable proportion of those in power are gay but not openly.
- speedplane 9y agoNot sure about that. In the US it seems that the most vocal opponents of gay rights often get caught with their pants down in some embarrassing homosexual encounter.
- peteretep 9y agoQuite. This technology will terrify them.
- intoverflow2 9y agoCan't really put the deep learning genie back in the bottle at this point. Even if this research wasn't released, someone who wanted to do this would be able to figure it out eventually. This is just the first step, things are about to get much worse.