Artificial intelligence is awesome if it’s used to perform delicate surgery or help assemble cars or even help out the elderly (I’m guessing this is not too far off in the future). But if you have to use a robot to tell you how hot (or not) you are, then there’s seriously something wrong with this world.
Meet Blinq, a new dating app, which is basically the app version of hot or not site, that caters to the modern age. Users just need to upload their pictures onto the app, after which the app determines people’s ages and their attractiveness. Ostensibly, the app is meant to help users choose the most liked pictures for their dating profile, but it could also be used in weeding out unattractive prospective partners.
Image source: Blinq
Blinq dating app was developed with a team of researchers at the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich, and the Swiss app uses the same algorithm as howhot.io. Here too, users upload their pictures so a robot can tell them how hot, or not, they are, on a scale of ‘Hmm,’ ‘OK,’ ‘Nice,’ ‘Hot,’ ‘Stunning,’ or ‘Godlike.’
Suggested read: Top 10 dating apps of 2015 that took the world by storm
Speaking to Mic, Alex Zimmermann, co-founder of Blinq dating app, said,
“The software behind howhot.io learned from millions of images of faces how to determine the attractiveness, age and gender of a person. When a user uploads a photo, the software first tries to find the location of the face. In the next step, a deep neural network – something like an artificial version of the human brain – analyzes the face with the knowledge of all the images seen before to [make its rankings.]”
Zimmermann insists that the app doesn’t intend to distill cultural beauty standards into a mathematical formula. Reiterating the fact that the app is meant to help people choose the best profile picture that is going to get them the most positive responses, specifically from a pool of people they’re most likely to find attractive.
Image source: Blinq
Further, Zimmermann said,
“We try to fix the problem that a lot of people do not know what kind of images do work well on dating apps. With out technology we try to give a suggestion in seconds which image to choose.”
“We tried to learn personalized preferences, i.e., if you like men with a beard, after you have liked a couple of men with a beard the proposed system would recognize that and know that you prefer men with a beard,” Rasmus Rothe, one of the PhD researchers behind the technology, told TechCrunch. “For howhot.io we simplified the process and just learned the ‘objective criteria… which is very difficult, because it is really a subjective thing!”
Reiterating that fact, Rothe and his team insisted that uses not take the AI judgments too seriously. Plus, they also note that ‘attractiveness is highly subjective and its perception differs from culture to culture,’ on their site.
God save us all!
Featured image source: Blinq
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