ΑΙhub.org
 

The Good Robot Hot Take: Detecting sexuality with AI is fake science


by
22 July 2023



share this:
Space scene with words Good Robot Podcast

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.

The Good Robot Hot Take: Detecting Sexuality with AI is Fake Science

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.

Listen to the episode here:

For the reading list and transcript for this episode, visit The Good Robot website.

This episode is also available to watch on YouTube:

About The Good Robot Podcast

Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry Mackereth are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.




The Good Robot Podcast




            AIhub is supported by:



Related posts :



Identifying patterns in insect scents using machine learning

  19 Dec 2025
Scientists will use machine learning to predict what types of molecules interact with insect olfactory receptors.

2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium interviews compilation

  18 Dec 2025
We collate our interviews with the 2025 cohort of doctoral consortium participants.

A backlash against AI imagery in ads may have begun as brands promote ‘human-made’

  17 Dec 2025
In a wave of new ads, brands like Heineken, Polaroid and Cadbury have started celebrating their work as “human-made”.

AIhub blog post highlights 2025

  16 Dec 2025
As the year draws to a close, we take a look back at some of our favourite blog posts.

Using machine learning to track greenhouse gas emissions

  15 Dec 2025
PhD candidate Julia Wąsala searches for greenhouse gas emissions in satellite data.

AAAI 2025 presidential panel on the future of AI research – video discussion on AGI

  12 Dec 2025
Watch the first in a series of video discussions from AAAI.

The Machine Ethics podcast: the AI bubble with Tim El-Sheikh

Ben chats to Tim about AI use cases, whether GenAI is even safe, the AI bubble, replacing human workers, data oligarchies and more.

Australia’s vast savannas are changing, and AI is showing us how

Improving decision-making for dynamic and rapidly changing environments.



 

AIhub is supported by:






 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence