Another example of technology apparently proving itself and promptly becoming a political football.

Row over AI that ‘identifies gay faces’

A program looks at a photo of a human face and can tell you with 70% to 80% accuracy whether that person is gay or straight. And interesting trick, I suppose, but at this point in society I’ m unclear what actual purpose such a thing would serve. But unsurprisingly, people are annoyed that the capability seems to exist.

The algorithm was built using 14,000 photos culled from dating sites. On one hand, this is a useful strategy… the site members would presumably accurately self-report their sexuality. On the other hand, it is necessarily somewhat limited… people post what they think are their best photos, and ugly folks of any sexuality would *presumably* be less likely to post their photos.

Additionally, all the photos were of white folks. This is again a useful strategy for early development; keeping the group of limited visual diversity would presumably help the computer from getting too confused. But to be *truly* functional, it would need to be able to tell a gay white guy from a straight black woman from a straight Thai man to a gay Eskimo woman.

But even then… “functional” it may be, but “useful?” I suppose it could be handy for forensics… find a dead body somewhere, if you can reconstruct the face, knowing if the corpse was gay or straight might be useful in a police investigation.

Of course, it being early in the process the whole thing could easily fall apart. It may prove to be an unrepeatable system, as reliable as phrenology.