An artificial intelligence program would be able to recognize the sexual orientation of people from simple photos.
Michal Kosinski – the Stanford University professor who went viral last week for research suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can detect whether people are gay or straight based on photos – said sexual orientation was just one of many characteristics that algorithms would be able to predict through facial recognition.
Using photos, AI will be able to identify people’s political views, whether they have high IQs, whether they are predisposed to criminal behavior, whether they have specific personality traits and many other private, personal details that could carry huge social consequences, he said.
Researchers at the American University of Stanford have published a scientific article showing that it would be possible for an artificial intelligence to know whether people are homosexual or heterosexual, just by analyzing their faces on photos.
This would be based on the idea that homosexual men would often have female facial features and lesbians often have masculine traits. The program would have “trained” on 35,000 photos on Facebook.
The results would be far from being infallible but nonetheless significant: researchers speak of 81% success for men and 74% for women.
