A new study from Stanford University has discovered that artificial intelligence can guess whether people are gay or straight based on photos of people’s faces.

Featured Image VIA

The research, which suggests that machines have significantly better “gaydar” than humans, found that a computer algorithm could accurately determine between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and the same for women 74% of the time. When the software was given five images per person this figure jumped to 91% for men and 83% for women. These findings obviously raise serious questions about how biological origins and sexual orientation are related.

The AI technology was used to determine more than 35,000 facial images of men and women publicly posted on a US dating website.

Image VIA

The general conclusion of the research, which was conducted by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was that gay men and women tend to have “gender-atypical” features, expressions and “grooming styles”. Gay men appeared to be more feminine and vice-versa. It also discovered certain trends including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, while gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women. Normally you’d describe this conclusion as stereotyping, but as the study shows, the AI managed to predict the gender orientation of people’s faces with incredible accuracy.

Human judgers were not quite as good at the task, accurately identifying orientation only 61% of the time for men and 54% for women. The authors of the study said this means that:

Faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain.

This seems to support the theory that sexual orientation is influenced by certain hormones at birth, meaning people are born gay rather than it being a choice. But this is just one study and as is always the case, there are exceptions to every rule. Still, maybe someone should point it in the way of this absolute moron whose job it is to “convert” gay people. Wrong in so many ways.