Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this week's Good Robot Hot Takes, Kerry and Eleanor talk about a group of scientists in Zurich that tried to measure a correlation between brain activity and sexuality using AI. This smacks not only of previous attempts to use AI to try and "read" people's sexuality, but also of dangerous 19th and 20th century race science. We talk about how the language of science is weaponised against queer people, why there are no real scientific foundations to using AI to detect sexuality, and why science needs to think about sexuality not as fixed or static but wild and infinite. Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry Mackereth are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation.

A machine learning algorithm that can flag papers that may have come from paper mills could help publishers fight fake scientific studies. Paper mills may be the biggest organised fraud perpetrated on scientific journals ever. While there have been instances of individual researchers manipulating images or simply inventing data, paper mills serve up professional fakery on an industrial scale. Buyers can purchase a paper, or authorship of one, on any topic based on entirely made-up results. Biochemical and biomedical journals have been hit particularly hard, flooded with hundreds of fake research manuscripts.

Science gets a lot of respect these days. Seven in 10 Americans think the benefits from science outweigh the harms, and nine in 10 think science and technology will create more opportunities for future generations. Scientists have made dramatic progress in understanding the universe and the mechanisms of biology, and advances in computation benefit all fields of science. On the other hand, Americans are surrounded by a rising tide of misinformation and fake science. Scientists are in almost complete agreement that people are the primary cause of global warming.