[observationist]

Research in 2017 demonstrated a high level of accuracy in determining whether or not the person whose face was in an image was gay or not. 71% male, 81% female accuracy. When shown 5 pictures, accuracy jumped more than 10% in either case.

This was with a relatively small neural network fine-tuned on a relatively tiny dataset of 33k images of faces from a dating profile site.

If I had a million dollars I'd gladly wager it that some company with a deep dataset, like Google, could create a 99% or better profiler that goes just off a video of someone's face (not a single still image, but I'd bet that single image profiler could beat 90%)

Transformers allow for a nearly arbitrary vector length for feature space - if sexuality correlates at all to any of a million different facial features, then neural networks will be able to detect it. If you're doing a binary "straight or not" test, without distinguishing between all the values of "not-straight" , then you could use a very shallow, very wide transformer architecture with a million features, and train it on a consumer card, and get accuracy in the 90% range.

That initial study had technical flaws, not least of which was the binary classification of gay and straight, and only using white people. Technically, they used a base model, VGG-Face, which had a 4096 feature model and 17 convolutional layers.

Human accuracy was rated about 50%, and was effectively a coin toss with a slight accuracy advantage for women.

That's less powerful than something like nano-gpt. GPT-2 is orders of magnitude more complex and has a much higher degree of capability.

If you did this with nuance and skill and high technical savvy, with a sophisticated model of sexual preferences (not the 1950's notion of straight or not straight) you could get a very accurate and deeply creepy piece of software.

This works for emotions, nonverbal communications, truthfulness, etc. Biometrics can provide a terrifyingly deep analysis of things you consider private and hidden but which nonetheless present in unintended evidence available for analysis.

If you had a few hundred of these types of analyzers - say, for psychological factors, fitness, health issues, sexuality, political preference, etc, etc, then you could not only get a highly accurate snapshot of people through deanonymized bulk surveillance data freely available on the market, you could then create LLM models tuned specifically to the features and preferences of each individual, and then use A/B testing on your virtual populations to maximize engagement, force specific reactions and behaviors in response to media (timing, pacing, content, framing) , and so on, and so forth.

We're not nearly as inscrutable, private, or resilient as many people think, and there's all sorts of data being misused already. Maybe we should get that universal digital bill of rights thing going before BlackRock or Honeywell or the DNC decide to go all in on AI.

edit: To clarify, I'm not cheering this stuff on. No university would allow the study, and most companies would open themselves up to significant legal scrutiny if such a thing was ever used and they got caught, but this is a weekend project for a quant at a big firm - it'll cost them 20 hours and a case of red bull, with all the AI infrastructure out there, and the time, knowledge, effort, and cost to achieve things like this are dropping fast.

[hughw]

"if sexuality correlates at all to any of a million different facial features"

key conditional embedded deeply in that comment.

[observationist]

The key conditional is a question that is answered in the research already done, and it's "yes, sexuality correlates to facial features." The more facial features you track, the better the granularity, the more you'll be able to correlate. How you smile, your gaze, your presentation, and so forth all plays into facial features. These are going to culturally tie into expression of sexuality, and you might as well wear a sign for AI proclaiming your sexual preferences. Changes in facial features from genetics, hormonal levels in development, environmental factors, and other peripheral effects will correlate with sexuality as well, but not as strongly as the behavioral ones. The inherent features are context against which the behavioral features play.

It's not a physiogonomy trope or a statement that straight people have different fundamental facial features, that they grow differently - it's the macro and micro expressions, the behaviors, the style and presentation choices, and how those intentional active features play out on the substrate of the individual's facial structure. A small video snip is going to communicate a very large amount of information. TikTok could do this - and then create another model that inferred psychology and sexuality based on watch patterns, and yet another model that describes how different types interact and network, and yet another model that describes how information propagates through various networks, and so on, and so forth. Through differential analysis and repeated refinement of various models, you get to some very intrusive and scary places.

Anyway, /ramble. We need a digital bill of rights.

[Gigachad]

Falls under the category of things that are most likely possible, but serve no benefit to society and could only cause possible harm so why bother researching further.