Artificial intelligence can accurately1 guess whether people are gay or straight based on photos of their faces, according to new research suggesting that machines can have significantly better "gaydar" than humans.
一项新研究显示,人工智能可以通过人脸照片精确识别出这个人是直男还是同性恋,该研究认为,机器的“gay达”(同志雷达)比人类准确得多。
The study from Stanford University – which found that a computer algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women – has raised questions about the biological origins of sexual
orientation2, the
ethics3 of facial-detection technology and the potential for this kind of software to violate people's privacy or be abused for anti-LGBT purposes.
The machine intelligence tested in the research, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology4 and first reported in the
Economist5, 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 "deep
neural6 networks", meaning a sophisticated mathematical system that learns to
analyze7 visuals based on a large dataset.
The research found that gay men and women tended to have "gender-atypical" features, expressions and "
grooming8 styles",
essentially9 meaning gay men appeared more feminine and
vice10 versa. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower
jaws11, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women.