I Write Like A Dude, Just Like Danielle Steel
Boing Boing points us to a Gender Analyzer which asks the question, “Man or Woman: Who Is Writing That Blog?” The program is developed to use “Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman” using a “text classifier” that’s “been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women.”
So, where does The Sexist’s writing fall on the gender spectrum?
Well, according to the program, The Sexist is a man. Housing Complex, written by my colleague Ruth Samuelson, also registers as man-powered. City Paper’s mixed-gender blogs—Black Plastic Bag and City Desk—are classified as dudely, too. After the City Paper homepage—the Web site of a decidedly unmanly local newspaper—also came up as male, I began to suspect that the machine was broken.
So I ran a sure-fire female blog—one penned by noted romance author Danielle Steel—through the site. The program thinks it’s written by a man.
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Linked From: November 20th, 2008Washington City Paper: The Sexist - I Am Seventy Percent Man
4:54 pm[...] is beginning to get rather specific. Last time I plugged the Sexist into the Genderanalyzer, it told me I wrote like a dude. I basked for several seconds in the news, believing that I had fooled this widget through my [...]
4:42 pm
A man, duh.
4:50 pm
Yowch! That doesn’t work at all. Maybe the people who made it just assumed that most bloggers are men, so returning men wouldn’t tip anyone off.
6:48 pm
pwned.