Tell Me What You See

IMAGINE A PROGRAM THAT COULD PREDICT YOUR EVERY FETISH, MEMORISE YOUR EVERY DESIRE. WOULD YOU USE IT? ONE PORN COMPANY THINKS YOU WOULD. INSIDE THE LATEST ADVANCEMENT IN SEX, TECH AND GETTING OFF

- Terena Bell

In the fourth season of Silicon Valley, HBO’s Emmy-winning, Cupertino-mocking comedy series, one of the characters develops a visual-recognition app that can identify food in pictures, classifying every image as either “hot dog” or “not hot dog.” When one of the guys uses the app to take a dick pic, he discovers that he does, in fact, have a “hot dog.” They end up selling the technology to video streaming app Periscope, which plans to use it to detect porn.

Visual-recognition technology is, of course, nothing new. Most social media companies — dating apps included — use computer vision to enforce community guidelines and root out X-rated images. If Instagram or Facebook has ever deleted one of your photos, it’s because computer vision told it to. For the most part, its function has been to prevent adult content from spreading where it doesn’t belong.xHamster, one of the highest-trafficked porn sites, has other plans.

Currently, to find a specific scene on the site, users have to browse a category page or search a tag. xHamster vice president Alex Hawkins wants to move toward searches without words — ones in which “AI facial and body recognition tech” will access your viewing history “to identify similar performers or the same performer or similar videos.” The question is, can it be done? Distinguishing one hot dog from another hot dog isn’t easy — that is to say, recognising something as pornographic is a different skill from finding the best video for you. In a world where most computer-vision technology is developed to identify tangible objects such as clothing and food, can an algorithm be trained to know your sexual desires?