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As artificial intelligence continues to permeate every aspect of our daily lives, concerns over how it should be used are causing fierce debates. For those in the LGBTQ community, recent reports have shed light on how AI can be used to create a more inclusive environment — and a more marginalizing one. 

These concerns have been brewing. By 2021, it was a common assumption that AI would “always fail LGBTQ people,” anthropologist and gender studies expert Mary L. Gray said to Forbes. While LGBTQ+ communities continue to evolve, it is the “very fact that we grow and develop our identities, and our community, which means AI will struggle to understand [LGBTQ people],” Forbes said. 

The evolution of LGBTQ+ rights means that people who identify with these groups “constantly push what is possible,” said Gray. But while this may be a net benefit for LGTBQ+ people, it can be problematic for AI, which “does its best job when it has something static.” 

What are the issues with AI and the LGBTQ community? 

Part of the problem is that AI “[builds] decision-making models by looking at existing or ‘staple’ decisions,” which it then tries to replicate, Gray said to Forbes. So by design, AI “excludes and pushes to the margins anything that doesn’t have a robust example,” said Gray. This can be problematic when trying to include people who identify with a wide spectrum of sexualities. 

And while many LGBTQ+ people are working in the AI field, there is a “divergence between the queer people interested in artificial intelligence and how the same group of people is represented by the tools their industry is building,” Wired said. When AI was asked by reporters at Wired to create an image of a queer person, the program “universally responded with stereotypical depictions of LGBTQ culture,” said the outlet. 

These AI-generated results “frequently presented a simplistic, whitewashed version of queer life,” said Wired. The AI program that Wired used, Midjourney, created results where “lesbian women are shown with nose rings and stern expressions. Gay men are all fashionable dressers with killer abs. Basic images of trans women are hypersexualized, with lingerie outfits and cleavage-focused camera angles.”

And when it comes to the LGTBQ+ community, AI is doing more than just generating images. One group of Swiss researchers says they have “developed an AI model that can tell if you’re gay or straight,” said Coda Story. These researchers report that by “studying subjects’ electrical brain activity,” their AI model can “differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual men with an accuracy rate of 83%.”

Critics say that this model, like Midjourney, oversimplifies sexuality and gender. “Bisexual and asexual individuals exist but are ‘simplified away’ by the Swiss study in order to make their experimental setup workable,” Qinlan Shen, a research scientist at Oracle Labs, said to Coda Story. This means that AI technology “can and will be used as a tool of surveillance and repression in places of the world where LGBT+ expression is punished,” said Shen. 

How can these issues be addressed?

There is no clear answer. Because when it comes to understanding sexuality, a “human being obviously does a way better job, because they draw out nuances in speech that a machine can’t,” the Austin Chronicle said. This is more evident when AI is “creating words, pictures or even the dreaded ‘social media content.’ AI gets trained to be as sanitized as possible — perfect as a tool of mainstream commercialization,” said the Chronicle. 

There are “plenty of useful applications of this technology, many of which have been in use for years already,” said the Chronicle. But as a “replacement for creative expression, there’s just no real argument for AI that holds up.”

However, there are LGBTQ+ people working to improve AI. Among them is Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who is widely considered one of the most influential figures in the industry. Artificial intelligence and tech is a “field with a lot of core representation and a lot of opportunity, and I certainly hope no one would choose to work in this industry because they’re queer or not,” Altman, who is openly gay, said to the Advocate. Despite Altman’s assertions, the concerns over representation in AI remain.