Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long 137
An anonymous reader writes "Can computers pick up your age and gender from your tweets? If you want to give it a try, here's your chance: 'To develop your software for age and gender identification, we provide you with a training data set that consists of blog posts, Twitter tweets, social media texts, as well as hotel reviews.' Well, at least my paid Amazon reviews are safe for the time being..."
assuming too much (Score:5, Interesting)
I am sure you can pick up on general mood of a person, I am sure you can pick up various clues, but if somebody is set on hiding themselves by providing false information, I don't think you'll be able to identify them without what NSA calls 'meta data', as in pattern of your behaviour. I don't think it will be possible to do a better job than guessing at about 50/50 chance ratio about a person's age and gender if the person in question is actively trying to portray something he or she is not in a single conversation. From a pattern of behaviour? Yes. From a single conversation? ... this assumes too much about people. It assumes that 16 y.o. girls are also not pretending to be something they are not as well...
metadata (Score:1)
screw the text content
timestamp, frequency and timing in general will give away much more information
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Re: assuming too much (Score:5, Funny)
Gotcha, you're a dude. Girls never use "btw": they use "fyi" with a whiny, self-righteous sarcastic undertone.
Thinking of that, this applies to flamboyant gay males as well.
So you are either an overweight straight guy in his early 30s or a Perl script written by an overweight straight guy in his early 30s.
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Bzzzt. You're wrong, lucm.
I'm female and use btw much more than fyi. They mean different things for gosh sakes.
FYI you're informing :P
BTW you're clarifying or adding an addendum.
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They mean different things for gosh sakes.
For gosh [practical-scheme.net] sakes? I never noticed that...
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Gotcha, you're a dude. Girls never use "btw": they use "fyi" with a whiny, self-righteous sarcastic undertone.
Thinking of that, this applies to flamboyant gay males as well.
So you are either an overweight straight guy in his early 30s or a Perl script written by an overweight straight guy in his early 30s.
no she is a 16 year old girl pretending to be an overweight straight guy in his early 30s pretending to be a 16 year old girl. :-D
Its meta-trolling all the way down.
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Men v.s. women ought to be fairly simple as long as we're dealing with untrained writers. Women use social words like pronouns and verbs about people more often than men. Women are also, arguably, slightly better writers than men on average because they make more of an effort in primary school.
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This is generally true (probably, I haven't done any scientific testing) and because of that any analysts and/or analytic program assume as much - which is why almost 95% of the time those instances define me as a female based on social behaviour in games/chats and texts that I write (stories, etc).
So while it is fairly simple to do it that way, it is also assuming too much as people are rarely, if ever, so one-sided that any clinical analysis could determine their age or sex short of looking into their pan
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which is why almost 95% of the time those instances define me as a female
Well, 5% of men like what women like, so that shouldn't be terribly surprising.
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You remind me of my wife, and this kind of "logic" is why women are arguably slightly worse writers.
If you think that is nonsense, than the whole original sexist line of argument is as well.
So what's your excuse?
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Women are also, arguably, slightly better writers than men on average because they make more of an effort in primary school.
... which just means that an slightly above average man can impersonate an average woman.
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... which just means that an slightly above average man...
That should be a, not an. You must be a guy.
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If I had mod points I would mod that funny because: I get it. Also there is actually a group of grown adult men who love MLPFIM (my little pony: friendship is magic)
Google bronies if you are curious.
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Also there is actually a group of grown adult men who love MLPFIM (my little pony: friendship is magic)
That is entirely, 100% true.
Google bronies if you are curious.
Or just wait for more of us to come out of the woodwork here.
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Nonsense. Men don't have to act a certain way, and neither do women.
That's true, of course. Men could all grow their hair long and women could all cut theirs short, but in reality it's the other way around in many cultures.
Studies about differences between men and women are just that - studies about differences. They usually don't find the mechanisms that cause the differences.
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Another example of a skewed view is the use of cosmetics. Men have used cosmetics in many cultures, that they don't in current "western" world is more of an exception than a rule. One example: Samurais, another: European upper class up to the ~1800s.
The same applies to things like having long fingernails (also nail polish - bu
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Sure that's true, but it probably doesn't matter as long as we're talking about analyzing English text written by people in 2014 +/- 10 years or so.
The important thing to remember is that statements about the difference about men and women should not automatically be taken to say anything about the underlying mechanisms. In case of hair length it's surely a cultural thing, probably originating when men had to cut their hair short in order to not have accidents when they worked in factories in the 1850-1950
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Really? Look up any live performance of a boy band on YouTube and then show me the equivalent with gender-reversal.
Except Japan doesn't count. Japanese are aliens.
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What a pile of crap.
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What a pile of crap.
What? A Congressman? Where?
In Washington, where else?
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IIRC the "Turing Test" was originally posed as if it were possible to tell the difference between a man and a woman. Rather than between a human and a computer.
The other issue is that someone attempting to decieve m
Re:assuming too much (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if someone got a program that was "pretty good" at figuring out age and gender, I strongly doubt they could make it accurate enough not to be a huge civil liberties problem.
IF someone were to make a program that was 99% accurate, that would still be some 3million 16 year old girls in the US getting their houses raided in case they are a perv. (ok they aren't likely to raid on evidence like that alone, but they might use it as probable cause to 'dig deeper' into who she is... and if she caused the false flag then she is likely an outlier who the gov't wants to know more about anyway, for retraining... I'll go don my tinfoil hat now.)
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Well, exactly.... its a base rate fallacy.
The false positive vs flase negatives are two different error conditions. A 95% accuracy is great, if you have only 4 suspects, and you are pretty sure one of them has to be the one, and a 95% accurate test separates out one of them.... awesome.
However, unless there are many more people pretending to be 16 year old girls than 16 year old girls, which seems highly unlikely.
That said, judging age can be hard. There was a small group of people that I used to IRC with i
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Yeah, but who cares what a 16 yr. old girl has to say about anything?
If you want to read a summary that makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
here's your chance to write one.
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Shady competition seeking to pay pittance for million+ Euro development, read all about it!
Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement! Slashvertisement!
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Nah, I'm kidding: even there it was gibberish.
Wow, what a great racket (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I could shell out 300 euro to have my next million-euro commercial product crowdsourced
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You don't give source code.
and the note : By submitting your software you retain full copyrights. You agree to grant us usage rights only for the purpose of the PAN competition. We agree not to share your software with a third party or use it for other purposes than the PAN competition.
Now that doesn't mean they won't use it. But it is easy to get it to call home if the date on the machine is 6 months later, or start some other more subtle problems. reverse the sexes, give data directly from the randomiser.
Seriously why doesn't NSA pay for this instead? (Score:1)
Why do we have to help them train the replacement twitter scanners after the EU is trying to cut off their direct pipeline?
The FBI is screwed! (Score:1)
How are they going to catch pedophiles now?
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I guess its the same problem. A girl hired for such a trap WILL behave other than a normal girl. maybe its not even recognized by the software then.
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Must have been...15 years ago or so, there was an SNL skit involving chat rooms in which a naked and hairy Chris Elliot pretended to be "Clair the filthy slut," a 16 year old cheerleader. Whenever I see anyone online claiming to be a young girl, I immediately think of a naked and hairy Chris Elliot.
This is a software contest (Score:5, Informative)
For those puzzled by the description here, this is a software contest, with a 300 Euro prize :
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What they forget to mention is that if your program also identifies ethnicity, you will be fined for racism.
But sexism is totally okay? (Score:2)
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Honestly no one uses usenet anymore for anything but porn and piracy.
Headline (Score:1)
>Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long
This is one of those posts where I have to read the summary, isn't it.
hi i'm chris hansen (Score:2)
So you like to chat with 16 year old girls on line?
Broken Slashadvert Yet again (Score:3, Insightful)
I'am sick of descriptions and subjects written in gibberish. Reminds me of spam emails.
Do you have a big cock, how big can your cock get?
Win £xxx pounds if your cock can be bigger than their cock.
Is your cock hidden? can people see your cock? CLICK HERE NOW!
How the fuck did this get authed? Not only is it the worst subject and description i've seen in a while, its an insult to the readers here. Seriously we are here for a reason, we dont have an attention span of a fish.
Oh yeah thats right, its a Slashadvert supplied by Corex.
No offence, but if this shit carries on, i may as well start reading my spam emails. Target your audience, not Facebook muppets ffs.
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I'am sick of descriptions and subjects written in gibberish. Reminds me of spam emails.
Do you have a big cock, how big can your cock get?
Win £xxx pounds if your cock can be bigger than their cock.
Is your cock hidden? can people see your cock? CLICK HERE NOW!
How the fuck did this get authed? Not only is it the worst subject and description I've seen in a while, its an insult to the readers here. Seriously we are here for a reason, we don't have an attention span of a fish.
Oh yeah thats right, its a Slashadvert supplied by Corex.
No offense, but if this shit carries on, i may as well start reading my spam emails. Target your audience, not Facebook muppets ffs.
For the record, my rooster is the biggest in the entire state. However, when I post pictures of it people get deeply offended. They sware I stroked by rooster so it stands taller and more robust. Hey, how else are you to get fresh eggs from your hens but by having the most spirited rooster. So Thats what I always send those spam emails. Never won any prizes though. As for the topic, Twitter will reveal all you really need to act like a teen if you follow enough of them.
*points algorithm at 4chan* (Score:2)
Researcher A: This... This c-can't be right!
Researcher B: What's not right?
Researcher A: Apparently, 4chan really is populated by little girls.
Researcher C: *posting anonymously on /a/* See guys, I told you -- wearing a skirt makes it work. Also, Check'Em.
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what I want to know is why is your 9 yr old wearing a fedora?
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Does she have a neckbeard?
Wow (Score:2)
According to the research, 83% of slashdot posters are 16yr old girls. Go figure.
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According to the research, 83% of slashdot posters are 16yr old girls. Go figure.
Well that explains Slashdot beta doesn't it.
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your approach is "genetic programming", some sort of unsupervised learning / reeinforcement learning.
What about the following sites? (Score:4, Interesting)
The "dialectizer" http://www.rinkworks.com/diale... [rinkworks.com] "translates" English to Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. And there's an English to Ebonics translator at http://joel.net/EBONICS/Transl... [joel.net] so it won't be that difficult to get a translator that outputs 16-year-old-girl talk.
I could not help myself... (Score:2)
Your comment run through the "Jive" filter at the link you provided:
OMG! Ponnies! (Score:1)
OMG!!! Ponnies! [cnet.com]
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OMG!!! Ponnies!
I got the "OMG", but I have no idea what a "ponny" is. Am I showing my age?
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Its like a pony except with two humps instead of one.
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It's a small denomination of BitCoin.
And not enuf to buy a reel spailchekker
Re:OMG! Spelling Natzis! (Score:1)
OMG! Spelling Nutzis!
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grammar nazi, its called a grammar nazi
Stereotyping (Score:2)
I suppose over time they could develop something keener, but if you're going to base it on the mean of all people in a certain age bracket, there will be enough exceptions to render the most useful applications of the software irrelevant.
I could see a bunch of ways... (Score:2)
I could see a bunch of ways to make tons of money from this, starting with selling it to FaceBook for $19B.
Why would I publish it for 300 Euro again? I know they *claim* it's not published, but if they didn't sign an NDA, you're not going to get a patent out of it outside the U.S., and you're not going to have any protection against them just using your algorithms.
This is a really silly contest.
yeah anyone who can, won't for 300€ (Score:3)
Three hundred euro? The contest sparks my interest, but 300 is about what it would take to get me to fill out the entry form. To develop an effective NEW algorithm, code it, and test it in HOPES of winning the prize? Maybe for 300,000, maybe. 3,000,000 would be more like it.
I've developed exactly two truly innovative products. One I sold over $1 million worth, the other still provides $3,000 / month in net income . Why would I, or anyone skilled and innovative, touch this for 300 euro?
Gender Genie? (Score:2)
(I say "attempt" because I found that even in cases where I wasn't trying to fool it, it would often come up with the wrong gender.)
Style leaves a lot of clues (Score:3)
A friend of mine was working on sentiment analysis. They studied the content of yahoo answer and it was quite interesting all the correlations that you can make. The study is of course not enough to provide a direct identification, but it shows how many parameters you need to keep in mind when building a "virtual identity".
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/... [ohio-state.edu]
Just what I need ... (Score:5, Funny)
Now both people and computers will call me a girl.
It'll be fine (Score:2)
I managed to get my impersonation of a 16-year-old girl into the training set.
A couple of rules to live by. (Score:3, Funny)
Mission Suspect (Score:2)
Wrong (Score:2)
Computers are very bad at judging these things. It isn't their strength.
Nice try NSA (Score:2)
Age is not all they are looking for (Score:2)
participants will be asked to classify the author of a set of tweets as journalist, politician, activist, professional, client, company, authority or citizen, since the fact of belonging to a certain category could determine the importance of the user's opinions.
If you submit a solution, know that it will be used to classify journalist and activist communications.
Just So I'm On the Same Page as Everybody Else (Score:2)
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What's my motovation to hide as a 16 year old girl?
To troll some nsa perverts into using their laptop camera exploits into think they are getting are going to spy/perv on a 16 year old female and instead get a naked neckbearded broney wearing a pantomime hoarse head while pulling a goatsx?
Turing test success1 (Score:2)
Look at the original proposal by Turing. I imagine Turing was very conscious about gender issues since after winning wwii for the old boy network they decided he was a felon. It seems to me the five eyes gives us Turing test success and...wait for it ... means that is not really what we meant by human intelligence.
Yes, but what if I impersonate a 100 y/o woman? (Score:1)
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I second that!
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I have come to the conclusion that it is because the world is filled with f*cking morons and that most people in charge of large sums of cash are the stupidest of the whole lot. I mean Whatsapp is a crippled xmpp chat app making no profit and it gets sold for tens of billions of dollars and I watch tv and see economists say whatsapp should have held longer because they could have gotten more money... what the hell. half to three quarters the people on slashdot could write a better chat app and none of us wo