I was reading an article which proposes the implementation of “subjective” captchas (pictured on the right) to determine if the user planning input data was a machine or not. It would show a series of pictures where the user would choose a person considered to be “hot” or “not.” While this can be pretty judgemental, it still works as the machines should have a more difficult time analyzing image data like that than simply analyzing strings of text.
Among the people chanting that beauty was ultimately subjective, there was a comment which I found very interesting.
Saying that beauty is “subjective” is kind of a cop-out. It’s usually said by those of us who wish it was true. Just because one out of ten thousand people might find an ugly person remotely attractive doesn’t make that same person “attractive” anymore than a guy with a fat chick fetish makes an obese 800lb woman “skinny.”
This is so true! So true that I don’t know if I should start worrying or not. This is much easier to apply to women than it is on men. Either way, I pray to God that at the very least, the [majority of] women would think I’m not ugly. Not being handsome is perfectly fine… just not fuh-huuuuuugly please!!!
The first part of the comment was actually this:
Subjective? Hardly.
It is scientifically known what makes an attractive person to 99.99% of society. Hell, you can take a classroom full of kindergarten children and they will almost unanimously and without disussing it, decide who an ugly teacher is and who a beautiful teacher is. They will then describe a beautiful teacher and ugly teacher with very different adjectives (one is mean, old, strict, dumb and the other is fun, nice, smart).
I think beauty can become a subjective element as one gains more experiences. But there probably is some kind of “default element” of beauty, a generic physical beauty in those who are truly “hot.” It’s the type of physical beauty that makes the above mentioned children decide who’s ugly or not right off the bat. And while we hate to admit it… to a certain extent, we roughly know if we ourselves are hot or not. The real question is what level of physical beauty, decency, or atrociousness we fall under.
But even if that was true, the problem with the captcha is it can alienate a lot of users when implemented in a large scale. What about the “ugly” people you decide to use, you would be doing an incredibly insulting disservice to them.
The concept behind it is brilliant no doubt, but why not just use “general” stuff you know a human can spot but a computer can’t. Say compare two images of a landscape – one computer generated, and a real one. And just ask people which is the CG (or real) one. I’m not into computer AI but I would think that the algorithms aren’t good enough [yet] to know the difference even if you use scenes that are obvious to the human eye.
You can even take it further by simply asking if the scene contained special effects (wether CG or not). So take a normal still of someone falling off of a building from the 911 footage, then compare it to something like a still of Neo from The Matrix jumping off a building. I’d think any AI would be hard pressed to know which one was the real footage.