Association Takes Extra Steps To Ethically Vet Sexual Orientation-Facial Recognition Study
Basic facial-detection technology analyzed the faces of participants on a dating website and looked for correlations between a person’s face and their self-declared sexual identity. The researchers say in the paper that these results “provide strong support” for the prenatal hormone theory of gay and lesbian sexual orientation, but advocates are calling it junk science.
KQED:
Can Facial Recognition Detect Sexual Orientation? Controversial Stanford Study Now Under ‘Ethical Review’
The American Psychological Association says that a controversial research paper that applied computer facial recognition to guess people’s sexual orientation is now under “ethical review.” The paper was set to be published in the association’s peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research, by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang of Stanford University, claims that a computer algorithm bested humans in distinguishing between a gay person and a straight person when analyzing images from public profiles on a dating website. ... The research has led to a firestorm of criticism from LGBTQ advocates and academics since it was first reported last week in The Economist. Two gay rights groups, Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, called the research, in a joint press release, junk science. (Venton, 9/13)