Calling Bullshit on the “AI Gaydar” (aka: “Science! It Works!”)

Herewith an excellent takedown of Wang & Kosinski’s “AI-based sexual orientation detector” (•), which comes to its conclusions based on a whole bunch of selfies (••) 

It is worth reading in it’s entirety, both for the takedown, and the methodology involved — science-based, and showing alternative/simpler hypothesis that show the same results, if not better.
It turns out that a handful of Yes/No questions about Makeup, Eyeshadow, Facial hair, Glasses, Selfie angle, and Sun Exposure are pretty much as good as Wang & Kosinski’s AI at guessing sexual orientation. As Blaise puts it “ it’s hard to credit the notion that this AI is in some way superhuman at “outing” us based on subtle but unalterable details of our facial structure.”

#DeepLearning has a tremendous future — heck, it has a tremendous present. But bad science is really not a good stepping stone on the way to the future…

(•) “Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images “
- https://psyarxiv.com/hv28a/
(••) It would have been much better if they had just called it something like “Selfie-based AI-gaydar” or whatever…