There are ample reasons to be skeptical of recent headlines announcing that “AI [Artificial Intelligence] Can Tell If You’re Gay,” summaries of a pre-print study by Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinski of Stanford University’s School of Business. Their goal is to “advance our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception” (p.1). For the first they fail miserably but I concur with the second, though the perceptions that are limited, in this case, are the researchers’ own. In this post I review the underpinnings of this research that render it much less insightful than the researchers claim, the problems of journalistic reporting that compound these problems, and the stunning tone-deafness of Kosinski’s defense of his ethics.