Can you imagine a world in which a machine will find out if you are gay, lesbian or straight just by analyzing the peculiarities of your face? This could happen if a computer algorithm that has just been designed by a team of researchers from Stanford University (United States) is as accurate as its creators proclaim (on the left, an image of the system in full “identification” of presumed traits homosexual or heterosexual).
According to these scientists, their system identifies the sexual orientation of the subject whose face he studies with a higher rate of success than humans. Find out if a man is gay in 91% of the cases (we stayed in 61% of the cases) and if a woman is a lesbian in 83%, compared to 54% of the times that an intelligence of flesh and blood achieves it , according to tests carried out by showing the same portraits to a group of volunteers.
The work is going to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, but its authors have released a draft and the conclusions, which have created controversy and are being contested by both specialists and members of the LGBT collective. , bisexuals and transsexuals).
A debatable sample
Criticisms of this research are based on the way it has been carried out and the assumptions from which it starts. The authors, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, used 130,741 photos of 36,630 men and 170,360 of 38,953 women obtained on an American dating website.
These images went through a facial detection technology filter that kept the 35,326 clearest photos of 14,776 individuals, which were the ones analyzed by the software. This takes into account physical features – such as the width of the nose or the shape of the mouth, for example – and other aspects such as ornaments, makeup and hairstyle. From these parameters, indicate the sexual orientation of the subject in question.
LGBT groups have protested because the images used in the study show only white people and do not include elderly, bisexual or transgender individuals, for example.
But they have also complained because they have been taken from a website to find a partner, where most people show similar photos, aimed at seducing and not showing reality. In statements to El País, Jim Halloran, digital director of GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, indicates that “it is not surprising that homosexual people who choose to register on a dating website publish photos of themselves with similar expressions and styles “.
Gay by nature?
But the aspect of the research that has received the most criticism has to do with the theory behind it. The authors start from the hypothesis that the exposure of the fetus to certain hormones during pregnancy influences its sexual inclinations. For example, if the baby is a boy and the mother has low testosterone during pregnancy, certain regions of the fetus’ brain may become less masculinized and increase the chances of her being homosexual.
Since androgens (male sex hormones, among which is testosterone) influence the formation of the face, Kosinski and Wang assume that gays will have effeminate features and lesbians masculinized, an assumption with which they have developed their algorithm .
However, there is no conclusive evidence to validate this prenatal hormonal theory as the main cause of homosexuality . In fact, science still does not know if being gay, lesbian or transsexual is something that is marked only in the genes, or if it is the result of a complex interaction between DNA, hormones and the environment.
In addition, critics of this research warn of the danger of developing algorithms and artificial intelligences that identify people’s sexual orientation, an intrusion into privacy that could lead to discrimination.
