It was brought to my attention by my husband that on the internal company blog (at my day job) there was a link to a new website called Gender Analyzer. They claim to use "artificial intelligence" to determine whether a website is written by a man or a woman. The reason my husband found this bot fascinating was because no matter how many times he took their "survey" to correct them, the robots insisted that Geektress was 99% male-written.
We here at Geektress generally find this more entertaining than insulting, though a quick survey of our favorite websites revealed mysterious results. Email exchange / Geektress Investigative Report after the jump.
Brenda: "We have strong indicators that [Geektress] is written by a man (99%)." To be fair, the GenderAnalyzer site is in the beta testing stages. Also, you can't analyze without anal.
Laura: Me thinks the gender analyzer needs more work.
Rania: Could be my fault. I am a tad butch.
Brenda: On the other hand, I plugged in FilmDrunk, which is written exclusively by a man, and the results were 93% positively strong indicators to manliness. So I'm gonna go tell Vince he's 6% less of a man than I am.
(His response was appropriately inappropriate for this blog.)
Brenda: For Jezebel, which from what I know is written mainly by women: "We think [Jezebel] is written by a woman (65%)." For Red White & Dude, which has one female contributor, "We think [Red White & Dude] is written by a man (71%)." So, in general, they seem to be right. WWTDD came up 100% male, which is 100% correct. And yet for us the robots are 99% wrong.
Laura: What's their criteria for judging gender?
Brenda: They say they use a "text classifier."
Laura: What does "text classifier" mean?
Brenda: Fuck if I know. Perhaps we write like dudes. Maybe we need to mention pussy less, because straight boys all talk about it, which might classify their text as "male."
Laura: When do we mention pussy on our site? In the podcasts, sure, but where on the site?
Brenda: I was thinking the same thing. "Sure, we talk about pussy nonstop on the podcasts, but we're fuckin' LADIES in our blog posts."
Laura: Maybe it's because we say "fuck." Maybe that's a het guy thing.
Brenda: Oh man, I'm gonna plug in the Comic Book Queers and see what it says. "An error occurred: Sorry, we can only classify web pages written in English."
Rania: Hahahahaha!
Brenda: The robots are confused by homosexuality. Technically speaking Geektress has a lesbian as a contributor, so I'm not sure if that makes us extra girly or extra masculine or just extra sexy. But it would go along with the "robots confused by gayness" theory.
Laura: Is homophobia common among robots? I would've thought that a lesbian would make us more femme. Maybe it's time to post more giant pictures of shirtless guys.
Brenda: If it's a text-based analyzer, it would do us no good. You know, on the one hand, you'd think (from a software standpoint) that similar operations would be favorable to a robot. However, (from a hardware standpoint) you can't join male with male (or female to female) without a considerable amount of electrical tape. I can see where it'd be confusing if you weren't programmed to love.
Laura: It all makes the love shared by R2D2 and C3P0 all the more special.
