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MODERN artificial intelligence is much feted. But its talents boil down to a superhuman ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data. Facebook has used this ability to produce maps of poor regions in unprecedented detail, with an AI system that has learned what human settlements look like from satellite pictures. Medical researchers have trained AI in smartphones to detect cancerous lesions; a Google system can make precise guesses about the year a photograph was taken, simply because it has seen more photos than a human could ever inspect, and has spotted patterns that no human could.
AI’s power to pick out patterns is now turning to more intimate matters. Research at Stanford University by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang has shown that machine vision can infer sexual orientation by analysing people’s faces. The researchers suggest the software does this by picking up on subtle differences in facial structure. With the right data sets, Dr Kosinski says, similar AI systems might be trained to spot other intimate traits, such as IQ or political views. Just because humans are unable to see the signs in faces does not mean that machines cannot do so.
The researchers’ program, details of which are soon to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, relied on 130,741 images of 36,630 men and 170,360 images of 38,593 women downloaded from a popular American dating website, which makes its profiles public. Basic facial-detection technology was used to select all images which showed a single face of sufficient size and clarity to subject to analysis. This left 35,326 pictures of 14,776 people, with gay and straight, male and female, all represented evenly.
www.economist.com
AI’s power to pick out patterns is now turning to more intimate matters. Research at Stanford University by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang has shown that machine vision can infer sexual orientation by analysing people’s faces. The researchers suggest the software does this by picking up on subtle differences in facial structure. With the right data sets, Dr Kosinski says, similar AI systems might be trained to spot other intimate traits, such as IQ or political views. Just because humans are unable to see the signs in faces does not mean that machines cannot do so.
The researchers’ program, details of which are soon to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, relied on 130,741 images of 36,630 men and 170,360 images of 38,593 women downloaded from a popular American dating website, which makes its profiles public. Basic facial-detection technology was used to select all images which showed a single face of sufficient size and clarity to subject to analysis. This left 35,326 pictures of 14,776 people, with gay and straight, male and female, all represented evenly.
Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality
Machines that read faces are coming
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