The Good Robot

Hot Take: Detecting Sexuality with AI is Fake Science

July 11, 2023 Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage
The Good Robot
Hot Take: Detecting Sexuality with AI is Fake Science
Show Notes

In this week’s Good Robot Hot Takes, Kerry and Eleanor talk about a group of scientists in Zurich that tried to measure a correlation between brain activity and sexuality using AI. This smacks not only of previous attempts to use AI to try and ‘read’ people’s sexuality, but also of dangerous 19th and 20th century race science. We talk about how the language of science is weaponised against queer people, why there are no real scientific foundations to using AI to detect sexuality, and why science needs to think about sexuality not as fixed or static but wild and infinite. 

This episode includes an ad for the What Next|TBD podcast.