{"id":29610,"date":"2026-07-13T16:05:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/?p=29610"},"modified":"2026-07-13T16:05:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:35:06","slug":"squinting-before-calibrating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/squinting-before-calibrating\/","title":{"rendered":"Squinting Before Calibrating"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence has been touted as the undeniable future not only of how information is procured, processed and disseminated, but also generally of the world as we know it. Queerness too is not outside this so-called future\u2019s ambit. As I write this, researchers are experimenting with how AI tools can aid <\/span>LGBTQ+ rights advocacy. \u201cThe use of AI-generated virtual characters offers a unique opportunity to facilitate advocacy by engaging individuals in simulated conversations that can foster understanding, education and empathy,\u201d MIT researchers argue in a 2024 paper testing how users respond to queer AI characters simulating conversations around coming out. Then, \u201cQueer AI influencers\u201d<\/span> have begun cropping up on the internet, challenging <\/span>human influencers to \u201cbring more authenticity and better storytelling to the table to stay relevant.\u201d All this, even as these AI influencers themselves sell a polished, calculated, and depoliticised brand of queerness. As University of Budapest sociologist Lilla Vicsek told Huffington Post<\/em> last year, these influencers \u201cwon\u2019t demand more rights, won\u2019t get depressed and not post for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other side of the table, critics have pointed out the many issues with artificial intelligence vis-\u00e0-vis queerness. Some of these critiques revolve around how AI tools are developed and deployed, such as how these tools resuscitate and exaggerate existing biases<\/span>, and can be used to violate<\/span> queer people\u2019s privacy. Other critiques, like that put forth by Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Nishant Shah<\/span>, concern how queerness is constructed amidst the rise of AI. Yet other critiques dwell on the infrastructures of artificial intelligence and their fundamental incompatibility with queerness. For instance, university of Salford lecturer Daniella G\u00e1ti has pointed out in a recent article<\/span> the \u201ccategorical logic\u201d of the code that runs AI algorithms: how they construct digital worlds that \u201cexclude fluidity and enforce strict boundaries between people and identifications,\u201d in G\u00e1ti\u2019s words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The critics have also suggested ways to ameliorate these concerns. Inclusive training datasets, better ethics<\/span>, and the involvement of queer people in development and deployment of AI tools<\/span> are some oft repeated solutions. Other less common but significant suggestions involve calls for a fundamental restructuring of AI systems. Shah, for example, suggests that \u201cqueering AI\u201d has to include an \u201contological reworking of some of its computational and discursive practices and definition, intentions and ambitions.\u201d How? Through \u201ccollective, fragmented, and promiscuous AI systems,\u201d Shah adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to take this opportunity to introduce a different critique into the picture by pausing at the premise with which I began this article: that AI represents an advance, that it is an otherwise neutral instrument waiting to be directed towards better or worse ends. Most critiques of AI as well as the proposed solutions have one belief in common: that troubles of AI are largely those of calibration. And that imbuing this seemingly neutral technology with queerness will solve these troubles and herald, to borrow Shah\u2019s words, \u201ckinships and collectivities that contaminate the gentrified digital futures with joyful possibility\u201d. I am unsure. Before we undertake this project of calibration, I wish to examine what it means for a digital technology to make a stride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In making sense of this moment, I am importing to the AI context what historian of science and technology Kavita Philip wrote of the internet in \u201cThe Internet Will be Decolonized\u201d (2021). In the 1990s, the internet\u2019s story was one of transcendence, of a frictionless virtual space, free from the \u201cmeatspace\u201d troubles of race, colonialism, and gender. AI\u2019s story today is overwhelmingly similar: a neutral instrument that learns from the data, and in seeing and doing what humans cannot, precipitates futures that humans cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, what if AI\u2019s purported futures are, in fact, reprisals of the past?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2017 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em> paper<\/span>, Stanford computer scientist Yilun Wang and psychologist Michal Kosinski reported training a deep neural network (DNN) \u2013 a kind of artificial intelligence \u2013 to distinguish between facial images of gay and straight people. The DNN outperformed \u201chuman judges\u201d, they claimed: given a single facial image the classifier could \u201ccorrectly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 74% of cases for women\u201d compared with human judges\u2019 61% and 54% accuracy respectively. When given five images, the DNN\u2019s accuracy reportedly climbed to 91% for men and 83% for women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The duo saw this as evidence for the prenatal hormone theory. Proponents of this theory believe \u2013 incorrectly for the most part \u2013 that a person\u2019s sexual orientation is determined by the exposure they have to hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone as a foetus. \u201cConsistent with [the theory], gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles,\u201d Wang and Kosinski wrote in their paper. Here is what they meant, revealed a few pages later: as compared with heterosexual men, gay men should have \u201csmaller jaws and chins, slimmer eyebrows, longer noses, and larger foreheads; the opposite should be true for lesbians.\u201d The duo also chalked the humans\u2019 failure to the \u201climits of human perception\u201d. That is, according to them, a person\u2019s sexual orientation is detectable through external features \u2013 just not by humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amidst all this, there was one thing they refused to consider: that sexual orientation might not be, quite literally, written on one\u2019s face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using a person\u2019s external features to predict their behavioural traits and character is called physiognomy. Even though Wang and Kosinski acknowledged it as a \u201cmix of superstition and racism disguised as science,\u201d they went on to justify their project as a taboo-breaking endeavour. Three researchers from Google and Princeton University, Blaise Ag\u00fcera y Arcas, Margaret Mitchell, and Alexander Todorov, called similar endeavours \u201cPhysiognomy\u2019s New Clothes\u201d<\/span>. In a separate article<\/span>, they challenged Wang and Kosinski\u2019s work as scientifically unsound, one that confounds cultural differences as biological ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLike computers or the internal combustion engine, AI is a general-purpose technology that can be used to automate a great many tasks, including ones that should not be undertaken in the first place,\u201d Ag\u00fcera y Arcas, Mitchell, and Todorov, wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attempt to read sexuality from biological artifacts has a long scientific history \u2013phrenology, craniology, and even the genetic attempts of the twentieth century. Despite its repeated failure, its appeal is little dampened, as demonstrated by the Wang and Kosinski saga. What AI adds to this tradition of biological essentialism is another figure of authority. Historically, the power over people\u2019s sexuality has rested with, among others, the state, religion, and the medical and scientific establishment. To this, AI adds the authority of computational scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Computational authority is particularly difficult to resist because it conceals its own exercise of power under the garb of technological neutrality. Consider the commonplace adage<\/a> \u2018your AI is only as good as the data\u2019. Here, not only do \u201cAI\u201d and \u201cdata\u201d appear as distinct terms, but also the \u2018goodness\u2019 of the former is contingent on the latter. In distinguishing \u201cAI\u201d from \u201cdata\u201d, we not only make a distinction between the algorithm and its infrastructure, but also displace the responsibility of goodness onto the latter. It is through this process of displacement \u2013 of morality, and of bias \u2013 that the algorithm is constructed as neutral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, resisting this authority cannot just involve building better classifiers, or training them on more inclusive data, or ensuring queer people are in the room when the models are designed (remember that OpenAI\u2019s CEO Sam Altman is gay). These are calibrations, and calibration accepts the legitimacy of the instrument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we resist computational authority, then? That work begins, I suggest, by learning to see differently. In a 2004 book, sociologist Satish Deshpande defined the task of sociology as \u201csquinting\u201d. A decade later, in 2014, sociologist Pushpesh Kumar wrote about<\/a> \u201csquinting through queer eyes\u201d as a means of \u201cincorporating the sexuality perspective in Indian sociology.\u201d To resist computational authority, then, we squint. At AI\u2019s claims of making unimaginable strides, at our instinct to be impressed by the speed at which it makes these strides. And at the belief that queering AI will manifest a queer future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Squinting is not all of resistance. But it could be where the work begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cover image by Google DeepMind<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning to see differently<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":29611,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5450,5],"tags":[5542,4737,5232,5546,2328,5545,5543,5399,3726,5498,5431,501,25,5544],"class_list":{"0":"post-29610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-information-and-sexuality","8":"category-issueinfocus","9":"tag-ai-and-queerness","10":"tag-ai-bias","11":"tag-ai-ethics","12":"tag-algorithmic-bias","13":"tag-artificial-intelligence","14":"tag-computational-authority","15":"tag-digital-technology","16":"tag-gender-and-sexuality","17":"tag-lgbtqia-2","18":"tag-misinformation","19":"tag-queer-futures","20":"tag-queer-rights","21":"tag-sexualities","22":"tag-technology-and-society"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29612,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29610\/revisions\/29612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}