7 ms·

Row over AI that 'identifies gay faces'

39 points by yawz 9y ago

pavement 9y ago
I think the signal that the AI bot has identified is very likely to be related to the effects of differing hormonal exchanges and releases over long periods of time. We know that hormonal derivatives like steroids can influence appearance, and also that ambient secretions offer signaling at a distance among humans, in circumstances not limited to the synchronization of menstrual cycles, at a minimum. Take these factors together, and exclusive close proximity to gender concentrations based on preference likely results in mild changes in appearance that automated analysis can determine as a non-zero signal, and hazard an informed guess with. People are not wrong in claiming that this is a form of stereotyping, and that sometimes the stereotype will be incorrect. People may not like it, but just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.
- sova 9y ago
  Or their dataset is a dating site and they are training a neural net to see features that are not there. 70-80% accuracy for a neural net is pretty bad if you have taken a neural networks course. The fact that Stanford students are publishing this is probably not because it's sound scientifically, but because ostentatiously riotous subject matter will increase the number of citations dramatically. Frankly, I don't think it makes sense to infer sexual orientation based on facial recognition, and I don't think it is sound science behind any of these findings. Yes, there may be features that imply correlation one way or the other, but the fact that these features would be "undetectable by the naked eye but still visually present" leads to all sorts of murky science that is "based" on neural networks. Also, this sort of "science" will no doubt be used wrongly to classify people who have not even investigated their own sexual leanings at all. People will be saying that their 7 year old has a propensity to be gay or straight based on the length of their nose? Come now, this is just balderdash and it's no surprise that it's contentious. Trying to provide some sort of defense for what is clearly just the Academia version of Clickbait is also a waste of time.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    It's not clear to me -- your comment seems to contain conflicting statements -- do you think no correlation could exist between facial characteristics and sexuality? If you think there might be, do you think no program could ever detect it?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - sova 9y ago
      To answer your first question: Correlation could exist, but the idea that they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my sexual preference changes. Ponder that for a minute. Sexuality is not a boolean value, it's not a yes or no, it's not a this or that, even for people who are attracted to females they are not attracted to every female, and people who are attracted to males are not attracted to every male. It's such a silly thing to try and hone in on, because it removes the primary deciding component of human sexuality from the study: personal, intimate, real human preference. It's like attempting to discover one's favorite flavor of bagel shmear based on high school portraits. You may find some surprising results, realize neural nets are trainable phenomena, and then run around giving everyone plastic surgery because more pronounced cheek bones tend to prefer Strawberry Shmear, and if peoples' cheek bones were adjusted their flavor preference would change.
      - vadansky 9y ago
        >the idea that they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my sexual preference change No, it doesn't. It means sexual orientation and hormonal/chemical composition might be related, and hormonal/chemical composition might affect facial composition. Everything you wrote afterwards is just an emotional outburst to an uncomfortable results from a study you obviously didn't bother reading.
        sova 9y ago
        "Sexual Orientation and Hormonal Composition" is a whole field of research on its own. Sexual Identity and Portraits we scraped off a dating site is too tenuous a leap for me to appreciate as any sort of "data" for serious science. If they had taken 5000 people, asked them to self-identify, and took a blood sample and measured various hormones, that would be a lot more satisfying. Yes, I am emotionally bothered by this whole enterprise, because sexual orientation is not something you can understand through portraits, and this study makes the claim that 7/10 times a computer can do it. That's not the case. Let's say there's a 50% chance that hormonal/chemical composition and sexual orientation are related, and let's say there's a 50% chance that hormonal composition affects facial features. That means that for the both of them to work out we have a 25% chance they are correlated. That's a pretty generous estimate, given that there is no data supporting the second half of that equation where "hormonal composition affects facial composition" as far as I'm aware. The best we are doing with this dataset is inferring hormonal composition from what someone put down as their sexual preference. Or am I missing a large piece of the puzzle?
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  This bot's sample is a dating website. I'm going to bet my socks on the fact that all it does is detect fashion styles and trends and associate them to groups. The "male homosexual" group is most likely filled with individuals dressed in a more fashinable style who are also well groomed (eyebrows, etc.) I am certain that you could introduce a lot of errors by adding a bunch of metrosexual but straight individuals into the mix.
  - sbierwagen 9y ago
    The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality from image pixel values. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all.
    - Raphmedia 9y ago
      Thank you for the link. My respect for the researchers has increased. I still think that while the results are accurate(ish), they reveal fashion trends and not genetic changes. Can in point, the composite average of homosexual male has glasses. Facial features of homosexual are often gender atypical but that's trough a lot of effort to conform with fashion trends (eyebrow reshaping, smoother skin, "kinkier" smile, etc.). This is especially true on dating sites. The whole nature vs nurture thing. While I agree that hormone levels can impact facial features, I have yet to see a strong study proving that hormones levels can be directly linked to sexual orientation or gender identity.
taneem 9y ago
What disturbs me is the potential for a government, like in Iran or Russia, to use this technology to automatically screen and label people, as a precursor to mass-scale systematic repression. I get that this study is problematic, but there is no reason to automatically assume it's not possible. What evidence do we have that there is no correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality?
- xienze 9y ago
  > What evidence do we have that there is no correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality? Because then we'd have to admit that there's some real science behind physiognomy. From there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump away to realizing that race isn't just a social construct. This sort of thing leads down a road that most on the left don't want to go down.
  - ajross 9y ago
    You're strawmanning. No one serious claims that there is no genetically identifiable basis for grouping people of similar geographical backgrounds. Clearly there is. Go spit in a tube and send it to 23andme, they'll tell you their guess for a mix of your ancestry. When people say things like "race is a social construct", they mean the fact that e.g. Americans will consistently and reliably identify people with (for an example) 60% european ancestry as "black" based on things like hair nap, skin tone, clothing, language use, and behavior. Yes, these studies have been done. So if you are concerned about, say, the treatment of "black" americans by, say, the police, the field of genetics has absolutely nothing to offer to help you. Many of those people are genetically "white", as it were.
    - lsd5you 9y ago
      I'd argue you are anti-strawmanning. As with all these debates, there is a spectrum of opinions, but plenty of high profile (if not entirely serious) people do have implicit (and even explicit) beliefs closer to the strawman than what you have outlined. Or they may agree with what you say as far as it goes but then reject any implications or further analysis based on those and similar facts.
pigscantfly 9y ago
The press release from GLAAD and HRC is ridiculously misleading. One of their repeated claims - that the paper has not been peer-reviewed - is directly contradicted by the first sentence of the first page of the manuscript, and their other criticisms are similarly baseless. Mistakes that obvious imply to me that their goal is not an honest debate but rather to stir the pot and promote misinformation. The alternative is that no one from either organization read the pre-print with any scrutiny. In my opinion, it's especially telling that visiting GLAAD's site (including the press release) prompts an immediate pop-over asking for donations. Who is the unethical actor here, I wonder...? Edit: Can anyone downvoting me please stand up and tell me why?
- maehwasu 9y ago
  Not sure why downvoted--OP is pointing out clear, obvious lies from organizations with a vested interest in the topic. Is the assertion here that lies from gay people should be ignored?
- foldr 9y ago
  The other criticisms seemed perfectly cogent to me. A lot of people just don't know what "peer reviewed" actually means. I think that is the most likely cause of the error, rather than malice. It's pretty normal for charities to encourage donations, so I'm not sure what your problem is with that. You seem to be hinting at the idea that they have deliberately released an inaccurate press release to encourage donations, but there's no reason for them to bother doing that when there are many uncontroversial instances of homophobia that they could refer to.
  - pigscantfly 9y ago
    Thank you for responding. You're right about the donations; I'm sure this pop-over exists across their site and is not inherently sinister, but including a call for donations specifically over this divisive, misleading press release irks me, because it seems to encourage people to wage scientific debate via lobbying rather than more research, which is the opposite of what the world needs right now (see: climate change). However, you're right that it's irrelevant to the actual debate here. On a more specific note, claims like "The study assumed there were only two sexual orientations -- gay and straight -- and does not address bisexual individuals." (without mention that this is addressed in the paper and that better labels would likely improve results) and repeated hand-waving about hairstyles (without mention of the sections of the paper devoted to feature analysis which point to structural facial features giving the strongest signal to the model) do not present methodological flaws with the study and/or are misleading. Prof. Kosinski and Yilun Wang have issued a very polite rebuttal (here)[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3NORLoKWdz3big4xuk7Z4/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3N...] which details these and many other weaknesses with the press release. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone at GLAAD or HRC to understand what peer review means, and in fact, I'm sure they do.
tekromancr 9y ago
Phrenological Neural Networks
claytonjy 9y ago
I posted this as a reply elsewhere, but I think anyone inclined to believe this model/study supports the prenatal hormone theory should read this from Calling Bullshit: http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual_orientation.html http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual... The setup and modeling may be perfectly sound, but the conclusions are a big stretch: they didn't control for intentional differences in presentation (the data was dating site photos), nor did they appropriately test for significance of the supposedly subtle facial differences picked up by the model (gay men having more feminine faces, gay women more masculine ones).
- vadansky 9y ago
  People keep saying this, but as another HN pointed out: The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper by was done logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all. It's pretty disturbing how quick people are to dismiss papers that make them uncomfortable, latching onto the first excuse to dismiss it without even confirming if the excuse is valid or not. Clear Cognitive Dissonance in action.
  - foldr 9y ago
    They're "unaffected as possible", but not necessarily completely unaffected.
  - claytonjy 9y ago
    That's a really important point about this not being a novel DNN, but I'm not sure how it addresses either of the main criticisms from the link I posted. The first is that claiming this methodology outperforms humans is unfair; there's no expectation that Turkers are particularly good at identifying sexuality from photographs, they haven't been able to train in a remotely analogous way, and there's no comparison to "experts" in orientation recognition (if those exist). The second is that the authors of this study use the differences extracted by VGG-Face to claim support for PHT, despite not applying an appropriate statistical test to the differences in the features between groups. This is the bigger scientific misstep in my mind, the willingness to make a strong, apparently controversial claim (I'm not too familiar with PHT or its history) without properly validating it.
netvarun 9y ago
There was an interesting comment by hn user aub3bhat a while back about the political pitfalls of facial recognition tech: "But face recognition is a sensitive/politically-charged topic, I know several grad students (including me) who inspite of having ready-to-deploy scalable software and datasets (~10M instagram images) stay away from doing this type of a demo because reputational risks are enormous. Consider the controversy around geofeedia etc. The last thing you want as a PhD student is press interpreting your research incorrectly and blaming you for causing widespread harm. It happened to a student/professor in my department and even then the infamous study in question was in collaboration with the social network." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985
mabbo 9y ago
I'm inclined to believe that an ML algorithm can do what the authors claim- but maybe only for the data set they're using. The inputs are self-submitted photos to a dating website. Can we be certain that how people pose, smile, look, etc, isn't influenced by their intention- to find a mate of a specific gender? What if those same people were each asked to submit a second photo when they're told to 'act gay/straight' in order to fool the algorithm? It could be that this ML algorithm is picking up on very different cues than intended. But I wouldn't discourage the researchers over it- try it again with a better data set, one built for this purpose, and discover just what the algorithm is picking up.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  This particular algorithm is being talked about heavily in the gayer parts of the internet, and I keep telling everyone precisely this. This is interesting in as far as it shows that, in the context of trying to attract a partner, gay and straight people present themselves in quantifiably different ways, which I suspect most people sufficiently familiar with app dating culture would have already known.
  - vadansky 9y ago
    Again, I hate to keep parroting what another HN said, but I hate to see misinformation repeated: The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all. Basically, it's not as simple as "All the gay participants had rainbow flags in the background of their photo so let's ignore this study"
    - graphitezepp 9y ago
tweedledee 9y ago
Anti-gay stigma is useful to those wishing to exert control over a group via establishing in-group / out-group dynamics. One can remove a social competitor from a group by outing them as gay (even if they are not). The fact that it is capricious and the accusation unfalsifiable is an essential component. A 3rd party tool that can objective establish gayness would take away the subjectively. Society will have to move on to other mechanisms of group control just like we moved on from witchery and heresy.
- sago 9y ago
  We moved on from witchery and heresy by establishing objective criteria for determining witches and heretics? (I know you didn't claim we did, just pointing out that your examples don't seem to support your argument.)
program_whiz 9y ago
Its possible that due to the hormonal and genetic differences in gay vs straight people, they have slightly different facial structures on average. Just like people of different genders, despite having very similar genetics, generally have different faces on average. Whether using this tech on a mass scale is for good or ill remains to be seen. The tech could be used to oppress, or it could be used for good.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
If homosexuality is genetic, which I firmly believe it is, then it's an interesting question as to whether or not this genetic trait brings with it other physical manifestations. From a purely scientific point of view, it would be an interesting test of ML to see if some sort of relationship could be discovered. It's dangerous though to jump to conclusions that there is a physical manifestation without reams and reams of scientific study, including gene sequencing, etc. However, it's both interesting and dangerous, as the GLAAD press release states, because of the repercussions to gays in countries where it's not nearly as accepted. It probably won't stop Russia and other very homophobic countries from conducting the same experiments using their own datasets. In addition, very deep research including gene sequencing might inadvertently turn up the "gay" gene, which would then lead to it's own Pandora's box of issues. This might be one of those situations where we might not want to study too hard because of the repercussions associated with it.
alexandercrohde 9y ago
Worth considering: I think the reason this topic is so hot is not because of the study, but the "What if other people use this as a justification for X?" fear. For example, if it turns out that there are certain physical traits that predict sexuality, does this imply a physiological component (rather than a purely psychological one)? If there is a physiological component, I think some people worry this can be used to "pathologize" alternative sexualities. However, what if all the endocrine disrupters we're exposed to daily [1] that act as estrogens play some role in this? What if we make the topic so unspeakable that we fail to recognize environmental contamination causes both physical differences [2] and sexual differentiation differences [3]? This is part of the reason I think we can't reject information that may allow some socially-backward conclusion. Because we don't know all the other good things (i.e. medical) that information may be necessary for. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons

39 points by yawz 9y ago

I think the signal that the AI bot has identified is very likely to be related to the effects of differing hormonal exchanges and releases over long periods of time. We know that hormonal derivatives like steroids can influence appearance, and also that ambient secretions offer signaling at a distance among humans, in circumstances not limited to the synchronization of menstrual cycles, at a minimum. Take these factors together, and exclusive close proximity to gender concentrations based on preference likely results in mild changes in appearance that automated analysis can determine as a non-zero signal, and hazard an informed guess with. People are not wrong in claiming that this is a form of stereotyping, and that sometimes the stereotype will be incorrect. People may not like it, but just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

sova 9y ago
Or their dataset is a dating site and they are training a neural net to see features that are not there. 70-80% accuracy for a neural net is pretty bad if you have taken a neural networks course. The fact that Stanford students are publishing this is probably not because it's sound scientifically, but because ostentatiously riotous subject matter will increase the number of citations dramatically. Frankly, I don't think it makes sense to infer sexual orientation based on facial recognition, and I don't think it is sound science behind any of these findings. Yes, there may be features that imply correlation one way or the other, but the fact that these features would be "undetectable by the naked eye but still visually present" leads to all sorts of murky science that is "based" on neural networks. Also, this sort of "science" will no doubt be used wrongly to classify people who have not even investigated their own sexual leanings at all. People will be saying that their 7 year old has a propensity to be gay or straight based on the length of their nose? Come now, this is just balderdash and it's no surprise that it's contentious. Trying to provide some sort of defense for what is clearly just the Academia version of Clickbait is also a waste of time.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  It's not clear to me -- your comment seems to contain conflicting statements -- do you think no correlation could exist between facial characteristics and sexuality? If you think there might be, do you think no program could ever detect it?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sova 9y ago
    To answer your first question: Correlation could exist, but the idea that they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my sexual preference changes. Ponder that for a minute. Sexuality is not a boolean value, it's not a yes or no, it's not a this or that, even for people who are attracted to females they are not attracted to every female, and people who are attracted to males are not attracted to every male. It's such a silly thing to try and hone in on, because it removes the primary deciding component of human sexuality from the study: personal, intimate, real human preference. It's like attempting to discover one's favorite flavor of bagel shmear based on high school portraits. You may find some surprising results, realize neural nets are trainable phenomena, and then run around giving everyone plastic surgery because more pronounced cheek bones tend to prefer Strawberry Shmear, and if peoples' cheek bones were adjusted their flavor preference would change.
    - vadansky 9y ago
      >the idea that they are correlated implies that my physical features will change when my sexual preference change No, it doesn't. It means sexual orientation and hormonal/chemical composition might be related, and hormonal/chemical composition might affect facial composition. Everything you wrote afterwards is just an emotional outburst to an uncomfortable results from a study you obviously didn't bother reading.
      - sova 9y ago
        "Sexual Orientation and Hormonal Composition" is a whole field of research on its own. Sexual Identity and Portraits we scraped off a dating site is too tenuous a leap for me to appreciate as any sort of "data" for serious science. If they had taken 5000 people, asked them to self-identify, and took a blood sample and measured various hormones, that would be a lot more satisfying. Yes, I am emotionally bothered by this whole enterprise, because sexual orientation is not something you can understand through portraits, and this study makes the claim that 7/10 times a computer can do it. That's not the case. Let's say there's a 50% chance that hormonal/chemical composition and sexual orientation are related, and let's say there's a 50% chance that hormonal composition affects facial features. That means that for the both of them to work out we have a 25% chance they are correlated. That's a pretty generous estimate, given that there is no data supporting the second half of that equation where "hormonal composition affects facial composition" as far as I'm aware. The best we are doing with this dataset is inferring hormonal composition from what someone put down as their sexual preference. Or am I missing a large piece of the puzzle?
Raphmedia 9y ago
This bot's sample is a dating website. I'm going to bet my socks on the fact that all it does is detect fashion styles and trends and associate them to groups. The "male homosexual" group is most likely filled with individuals dressed in a more fashinable style who are also well groomed (eyebrows, etc.) I am certain that you could introduce a lot of errors by adding a bunch of metrosexual but straight individuals into the mix.
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality from image pixel values. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all.
  - Raphmedia 9y ago
    Thank you for the link. My respect for the researchers has increased. I still think that while the results are accurate(ish), they reveal fashion trends and not genetic changes. Can in point, the composite average of homosexual male has glasses. Facial features of homosexual are often gender atypical but that's trough a lot of effort to conform with fashion trends (eyebrow reshaping, smoother skin, "kinkier" smile, etc.). This is especially true on dating sites. The whole nature vs nurture thing. While I agree that hormone levels can impact facial features, I have yet to see a strong study proving that hormones levels can be directly linked to sexual orientation or gender identity.

taneem 9y ago

What disturbs me is the potential for a government, like in Iran or Russia, to use this technology to automatically screen and label people, as a precursor to mass-scale systematic repression. I get that this study is problematic, but there is no reason to automatically assume it's not possible. What evidence do we have that there is no correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality?

xienze 9y ago
> What evidence do we have that there is no correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality? Because then we'd have to admit that there's some real science behind physiognomy. From there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump away to realizing that race isn't just a social construct. This sort of thing leads down a road that most on the left don't want to go down.
- ajross 9y ago
  You're strawmanning. No one serious claims that there is no genetically identifiable basis for grouping people of similar geographical backgrounds. Clearly there is. Go spit in a tube and send it to 23andme, they'll tell you their guess for a mix of your ancestry. When people say things like "race is a social construct", they mean the fact that e.g. Americans will consistently and reliably identify people with (for an example) 60% european ancestry as "black" based on things like hair nap, skin tone, clothing, language use, and behavior. Yes, these studies have been done. So if you are concerned about, say, the treatment of "black" americans by, say, the police, the field of genetics has absolutely nothing to offer to help you. Many of those people are genetically "white", as it were.
  - lsd5you 9y ago
    I'd argue you are anti-strawmanning. As with all these debates, there is a spectrum of opinions, but plenty of high profile (if not entirely serious) people do have implicit (and even explicit) beliefs closer to the strawman than what you have outlined. Or they may agree with what you say as far as it goes but then reject any implications or further analysis based on those and similar facts.

pigscantfly 9y ago

The press release from GLAAD and HRC is ridiculously misleading. One of their repeated claims - that the paper has not been peer-reviewed - is directly contradicted by the first sentence of the first page of the manuscript, and their other criticisms are similarly baseless. Mistakes that obvious imply to me that their goal is not an honest debate but rather to stir the pot and promote misinformation. The alternative is that no one from either organization read the pre-print with any scrutiny. In my opinion, it's especially telling that visiting GLAAD's site (including the press release) prompts an immediate pop-over asking for donations. Who is the unethical actor here, I wonder...? Edit: Can anyone downvoting me please stand up and tell me why?

maehwasu 9y ago
Not sure why downvoted--OP is pointing out clear, obvious lies from organizations with a vested interest in the topic. Is the assertion here that lies from gay people should be ignored?
foldr 9y ago
The other criticisms seemed perfectly cogent to me. A lot of people just don't know what "peer reviewed" actually means. I think that is the most likely cause of the error, rather than malice. It's pretty normal for charities to encourage donations, so I'm not sure what your problem is with that. You seem to be hinting at the idea that they have deliberately released an inaccurate press release to encourage donations, but there's no reason for them to bother doing that when there are many uncontroversial instances of homophobia that they could refer to.
- pigscantfly 9y ago
  Thank you for responding. You're right about the donations; I'm sure this pop-over exists across their site and is not inherently sinister, but including a call for donations specifically over this divisive, misleading press release irks me, because it seems to encourage people to wage scientific debate via lobbying rather than more research, which is the opposite of what the world needs right now (see: climate change). However, you're right that it's irrelevant to the actual debate here. On a more specific note, claims like "The study assumed there were only two sexual orientations -- gay and straight -- and does not address bisexual individuals." (without mention that this is addressed in the paper and that better labels would likely improve results) and repeated hand-waving about hairstyles (without mention of the sections of the paper devoted to feature analysis which point to structural facial features giving the strongest signal to the model) do not present methodological flaws with the study and/or are misleading. Prof. Kosinski and Yilun Wang have issued a very polite rebuttal (here)[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3NORLoKWdz3big4xuk7Z4/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3N...] which details these and many other weaknesses with the press release. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone at GLAAD or HRC to understand what peer review means, and in fact, I'm sure they do.

tekromancr 9y ago

Phrenological Neural Networks

claytonjy 9y ago

I posted this as a reply elsewhere, but I think anyone inclined to believe this model/study supports the prenatal hormone theory should read this from Calling Bullshit: http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual_orientation.html http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_ml_sexual... The setup and modeling may be perfectly sound, but the conclusions are a big stretch: they didn't control for intentional differences in presentation (the data was dating site photos), nor did they appropriately test for significance of the supposedly subtle facial differences picked up by the model (gay men having more feminine faces, gay women more masculine ones).

vadansky 9y ago
People keep saying this, but as another HN pointed out: The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper by was done logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all. It's pretty disturbing how quick people are to dismiss papers that make them uncomfortable, latching onto the first excuse to dismiss it without even confirming if the excuse is valid or not. Clear Cognitive Dissonance in action.
- foldr 9y ago
  They're "unaffected as possible", but not necessarily completely unaffected.
- claytonjy 9y ago
  That's a really important point about this not being a novel DNN, but I'm not sure how it addresses either of the main criticisms from the link I posted. The first is that claiming this methodology outperforms humans is unfair; there's no expectation that Turkers are particularly good at identifying sexuality from photographs, they haven't been able to train in a remotely analogous way, and there's no comparison to "experts" in orientation recognition (if those exist). The second is that the authors of this study use the differences extracted by VGG-Face to claim support for PHT, despite not applying an appropriate statistical test to the differences in the features between groups. This is the bigger scientific misstep in my mind, the willingness to make a strong, apparently controversial claim (I'm not too familiar with PHT or its history) without properly validating it.

netvarun 9y ago

There was an interesting comment by hn user aub3bhat a while back about the political pitfalls of facial recognition tech: "But face recognition is a sensitive/politically-charged topic, I know several grad students (including me) who inspite of having ready-to-deploy scalable software and datasets (~10M instagram images) stay away from doing this type of a demo because reputational risks are enormous. Consider the controversy around geofeedia etc. The last thing you want as a PhD student is press interpreting your research incorrectly and blaming you for causing widespread harm. It happened to a student/professor in my department and even then the infamous study in question was in collaboration with the social network." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985

mabbo 9y ago

I'm inclined to believe that an ML algorithm can do what the authors claim- but maybe only for the data set they're using. The inputs are self-submitted photos to a dating website. Can we be certain that how people pose, smile, look, etc, isn't influenced by their intention- to find a mate of a specific gender? What if those same people were each asked to submit a second photo when they're told to 'act gay/straight' in order to fool the algorithm? It could be that this ML algorithm is picking up on very different cues than intended. But I wouldn't discourage the researchers over it- try it again with a better data set, one built for this purpose, and discover just what the algorithm is picking up.

graphitezepp 9y ago
This particular algorithm is being talked about heavily in the gayer parts of the internet, and I keep telling everyone precisely this. This is interesting in as far as it shows that, in the context of trying to attract a partner, gay and straight people present themselves in quantifiably different ways, which I suspect most people sufficiently familiar with app dating culture would have already known.
- vadansky 9y ago
  Again, I hate to keep parroting what another HN said, but I hate to see misinformation repeated: The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all. Basically, it's not as simple as "All the gay participants had rainbow flags in the background of their photo so let's ignore this study"
  - graphitezepp 9y ago

tweedledee 9y ago

Anti-gay stigma is useful to those wishing to exert control over a group via establishing in-group / out-group dynamics. One can remove a social competitor from a group by outing them as gay (even if they are not). The fact that it is capricious and the accusation unfalsifiable is an essential component. A 3rd party tool that can objective establish gayness would take away the subjectively. Society will have to move on to other mechanisms of group control just like we moved on from witchery and heresy.

sago 9y ago
We moved on from witchery and heresy by establishing objective criteria for determining witches and heretics? (I know you didn't claim we did, just pointing out that your examples don't seem to support your argument.)

program_whiz 9y ago

Its possible that due to the hormonal and genetic differences in gay vs straight people, they have slightly different facial structures on average. Just like people of different genders, despite having very similar genetics, generally have different faces on average. Whether using this tech on a mass scale is for good or ill remains to be seen. The tech could be used to oppress, or it could be used for good.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

If homosexuality is genetic, which I firmly believe it is, then it's an interesting question as to whether or not this genetic trait brings with it other physical manifestations. From a purely scientific point of view, it would be an interesting test of ML to see if some sort of relationship could be discovered. It's dangerous though to jump to conclusions that there is a physical manifestation without reams and reams of scientific study, including gene sequencing, etc. However, it's both interesting and dangerous, as the GLAAD press release states, because of the repercussions to gays in countries where it's not nearly as accepted. It probably won't stop Russia and other very homophobic countries from conducting the same experiments using their own datasets. In addition, very deep research including gene sequencing might inadvertently turn up the "gay" gene, which would then lead to it's own Pandora's box of issues. This might be one of those situations where we might not want to study too hard because of the repercussions associated with it.

alexandercrohde 9y ago

Worth considering: I think the reason this topic is so hot is not because of the study, but the "What if other people use this as a justification for X?" fear. For example, if it turns out that there are certain physical traits that predict sexuality, does this imply a physiological component (rather than a purely psychological one)? If there is a physiological component, I think some people worry this can be used to "pathologize" alternative sexualities. However, what if all the endocrine disrupters we're exposed to daily [1] that act as estrogens play some role in this? What if we make the topic so unspeakable that we fail to recognize environmental contamination causes both physical differences [2] and sexual differentiation differences [3]? This is part of the reason I think we can't reject information that may allow some socially-backward conclusion. Because we don't know all the other good things (i.e. medical) that information may be necessary for. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Uses 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance#In_humans 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons