What does gay people look like
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That may be because they were the quickest at making their guesses. But previous research showed that people presented with pictures of men have a better than average chance of sorting them into straight or gay. "You just know."
You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.
YouTube science teachers Mitch Moffit and Greg Brown cited controversial research that found gay people have different physical features than their straight counterparts.
Their claims that AI could be trained to recognise someone’s sexuality were picked up in newspaper reports – but experts in the field said they strongly doubted this was reliable.
Dominic Lees, a professor specialising in AI at the University of Reading, said Moffit and Brown had not carried out any original research, but had only reviewed earlier studies.
We don’t know how they selected the data or if they cherry picked it.
‘This information should be included in the detail of the actual publication, but often they aren’t or often they’re glossed over.
‘There’s been this view that AI is infallible, that just saying “we used an AI model” means this is perfectly accurate, where actually what we’ve seen time and time again, models not only carry on human biases but enshrine them in an authoritative way.
‘It’s junk science, it’s superstition, and we do not have the data to say whether there’s anything to it or not.’
And even when AI is not involved, there is still the question of ethics.
Mr Bore explained: ‘There are issues around prejudices, around outing people who don’t want to be outed or identifying people who may not want to be identified as part of a particular group for whatever reason.’
A controversial history
Researchers have previously tried to establish whether or not it’s possible to tell someone’s sexuality based on their face — and were heavily criticised for it.
In 2017, an AI model from Stanford University was criticised for using photos from dating apps to discern if someone was gay or straight, based on their facial features and sexual preference on the app.
The researchers behind Stanford’s model later described criticism of their model as a ‘knee-jerk reaction’.
But Mr Bore pointed out the dangers of taking this kind of study at face value.
He said: ‘People have been persecuted and died in the past because this sort of research has been used to identify people as part of a group, and then they’ve been imprisoned, killed, driven out of countries.
‘But we have knee jerk reactions for a reason, and anyone involved in this study really needs to stop and think and consider the potential consequences, especially if they’re going to release the model.
‘We have countries where being gay is a criminal offence.
Experts have brilliant response to pseudo-science
So-called ‘gay face’ has been in the media again this week after a video went viral claiming it existed. An academic review of the work would point out that every image shown is of a white person’s face, despite the report’s claims to make universal observations about “gay face”.
‘On this issue alone, the report cannot be trusted.
He and his colleagues are now using brain imaging to monitor brain activity as people look at pictures of gay and straight individuals without knowing their sexual orientation. They found that people were better at judging women correctly. I hope you’ll support us in that mission.
Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
Both Japanese and Americans were more likely to classify a gay face as heterosexual, compared with the Spanish.
The Spanish also often guessed wrong, but were just as likely to classify a straight man as gay. That suggests both facial features (which can be processed in upside-down and right-side-up photos) and facial configuration provide hints into orientation, the researchers report Wednesday (May 16) in the journal PLoS ONE.
It remains to be seen how or if people use "gaydar" in real life, when they have more to go on than a glimpse of a photograph, Tabak said.
Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
There's Something Queer about That Face
It’s Time to Stand Up for Science
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People presented with a still photo can make reasonably accurate judgments about some personality traits, such as how outgoing or agreeable the person is. The researchers speculate that because the Spanish are more accepting of homosexuality than the other two nationalities they may be more willing to judge someone as gay.
Americans were the most accurate overall in their judgments — 63 percent, compared with 58 percent for the Japanese and Spanish.
Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.
I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. In a first for studies of this kind, the researchers were able to directly compare how people did when judging the sexual orientation of men versus women.
In one popular optical illusion called the Thatcher effect, it's tough to tell even when the eyes or mouth are flipped the wrong way around in an upside-down face. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]
What earlier studies had not done was to tease out how people make these snap sexuality judgments. Some of the students saw upside-down faces, and others were shown the faces right-side up.
She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association.