Lesbian dating app to use facial recognition to exclude males

[zibzibara]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13484121/Lesbian-dating-app-use-facial-recognition-exclude-trans-women-matching-biological-females.html

This is from Jenny Watson who's known for fearlessly kicking out the males invading her lesbian speed dating events, now she's doing the same with a new dating app for women. Hopefully it will work as advertised but even if the usual crop of males manage to impose themselves through whatever deceitful trickery, it just further proves her point about how lesbians are being bullied out of their own spaces. Wishing her the best of luck with this!

I don't see how it can work accurately and could unjustly exclude people with different face shapes. I'm female and quite often have people be unduly paranoid I'm secretly a man as I have a strong face shape.

I’m sure she will be up to date regarding Tickle v Giggle. Sall Grover is in the fight of her life for excluding males…

She certainly seems to have immense determination, and endless energy.

And being threatened by TRAs - and no doubt some misogynists.

I am really hoping that the Lesbian Pride event on 29th event goes off without incident, and it really can just be a happy social gathering - with a message!

I hope it works for them.

I am really hoping that the Lesbian Pride event on 29th event goes off without incident

I went to something like that up north a few years ago. There were a few trans rights protesters but other than that it was ok.

Passers by were really titillated but it'll probably be less like that in London.

Well this will be outside Parliament. Jenny Watson is nothing if not bold.

But worry that the usual suspects will want to make their presence felt just because of where it is.

https://lcommunity.co.uk/reclaimed/

Giggle seemed to do successfully enough. Sal had huge numbers of male people complaining that they were rejected. It will come down to things like brow ridge, distance between nose and top of lip, even depth of the lip bow and the tilt of the eyes.

Facial recognition software has a huge race issue. It also misidentifies lots of women as men - particularly those with a strong jaw line.
It is hugely likely to misgender black women and has been proven to 'pass' trans women.
Computers also can't tell. This is, quite frankly, femininity policing.

What a shame we can’t just trust males to stay out of spaces which aren’t for them.

Isn't there something about the eyes of men and women being different? Perhaps the app uses that. I'm sure those more knowledgeable than me can provide an answer.

Ooooh, I can answer this as I once had this question in work about facial recognition software at airports!

Men and women have different facial proportions. In particular the philtrum is a different height and also the brow proportion. (There are fancy scientific words for this but I can't recall them.) It's not a size thing, more of a 'relation of one feature to the next one closest to it' type thing.

Anyway this is absolutely the case for all human males vs females - it's a skull thing not a fleshly facial features thing. Caused by hormone exposure in utero. So even if you think you have 'masculine' features, your skull says different and that's what AI is looking at via the specific proportions between various facial features.

Can't deal -- if the AI is fed any transwomen images during training, surely it would rapidly, erm, cock up the male/female ID?

..it's a skull thing not a fleshly facial features thing.

Adding that this is one of the ways osteoarchaeologists identify the sex of skeletons.

There was a study that found AI could correctly sex people based on retinal scans (back of the eyeball). I think that's the scans you have in an opticians tho, so might not be so practical irl

What a shame we can’t just trust males to stay out of spaces which aren’t for them.

Well said!

I'm brown and I did ask the race question at training, apparently not an issue, it's about relative proportions not the size of any specific facial feature. A woman can have as a big a jaw as her parents cared to gift her but it'll still be in female proportions with the rest of her face.

now the people who did our training were also the people who had built the AI product so they might be overstating that, I don't know lol. I also appreciate that different border forces do use different software but we do cooperate with our nearest neighbours on the set criteria and I've never known the system get bio sex wrong.

Please would you send me the links to the news items about which FRS got this wrong? I'd be interested to see the product/organisation using it.

https://www.nyckel.com/pretrained-classifiers/gender-detector/

This is the AI the app uses if you want to play around with it. I got 98% woman.

Just tried some out - Whoopi Goldberg came out as woman but with 86% confidence.

Dylan Mulvaney got woman as 98% confidence.

So it’s pretty useless.

I'm personally less bothered about commercially (ie B2C) available FRS as it's still fairly basic and not as good as the products used by big organisations, border forces, government offices etc. Because with someone like Dylan Mulvaney, if you're using a picture that he's posted online or from a magazine, the chances are he or the photo editors have trimmed his face to make it look more feminine - in fact they may even have used AI software to re-jig his face to female skull proportions (yes, that product does exist!).

So, assuming the lesbian dating app is using B2C basic software, it won't be 100% accurate but users of the app can use it to support their other perceptions that will tell them whether they're looking at the profile of a lesbian or a dude trying to get sex by deception.

The best software on the market is many factors better than what's available B2C and doesn't miss, ime.

What’s the best software on the market? I’m genuinely interested- I work in media and we’re looking at a number of AI things and I’ve found they all perform much worse than the providers claim.

I'm a civil servant and can't name the product, sorry.

The Dylan picture was a newspaper shot from an agency I know doesn’t manipulate pictures. I work closely with them.

Fair enough - I remain very unconvinced by these softwares especially as regards race.

Quite. The fact that women have to go to these lengths is insane.