One of pop culture's early but most seminal depictions of gay online dating comes from a 1999 episode of Sex and the City. Stanford Blatch, Carrie Bradshaw's gay friend, played by the late Willie Garson, is seeking advice. He's been chatting to another man on an online chatroom – the height of technology at the time – and wonders whether they should meet up. "What do you know about him?" asks Bradshaw. "Well, his name is bigtool4u" answers Blatch – cue hysterics from Bradshaw.

Emotional intelligence significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly viewed as a stride toward artificial general intelligence, exhibiting impressive performance in numerous tasks, it is still uncertain if LLMs can genuinely grasp psychological emotional stimuli. Understanding and responding to emotional cues gives humans a distinct advantage in problem-solving. In this paper, we take the first step towards exploring the ability of LLMs to understand emotional stimuli. To this end, we first conduct automatic experiments on 45 tasks using various LLMs, including Flan-T5-Large, Vicuna, Llama 2, BLOOM, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. Our tasks span deterministic and generative applications that represent comprehensive evaluation scenarios. Our automatic experiments show that LLMs have a grasp of emotional intelligence, and their performance can be improved with emotional prompts (which we call "EmotionPrompt" that combines the original prompt with emotional stimuli), e.g., 8.00% relative performance improvement in Instruction Induction and 115% in BIG-Bench. In addition to those deterministic tasks that can be automatically evaluated using existing metrics, we conducted a human study with 106 participants to assess the quality of generative tasks using both vanilla and emotional prompts. Our human study results demonstrate that EmotionPrompt significantly boosts the performance of generative tasks (10.9% average improvement in terms of performance, truthfulness, and responsibility metrics). We provide an in-depth discussion regarding why EmotionPrompt works for LLMs and the factors that may influence its performance. We posit that EmotionPrompt heralds a novel avenue for exploring interdisciplinary knowledge for human-LLMs interaction.

When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in "A Room of One's Own," her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future--that of queer literary criticism. Do not blush," Woolf cautioned her audience. "Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women." Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be ...

The Bank of England's new 50-pound note will feature mathematician Alan Turing, honoring the code-breaker who helped lay the foundation for computer science. The Bank of England's new 50-pound note will feature mathematician Alan Turing, honoring the code-breaker who helped lay the foundation for computer science. Alan Turing, the father of computer science and artificial intelligence who broke Adolf Hitler's Enigma code system in World War II -- but who died an outcast because of his homosexuality -- will be featured on the Bank of England's new 50-pound note. The new note will be printed on polymer and will bear a 1951 photo of Turing, the bank announced Monday. It's expected to enter circulation by the end of 2021. It will include a quote from Turing: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be." Turing was just 41 when he died from poisoning in 1954, a death that was deemed a suicide.

This is the controversial AI computer program that researchers claim can determine if someone is gay or not just by looking at a photograph of their face. According to the Stanford University researchers who developed it, the artificial intelligence system can infer someone's sexuality with up to 91 percent accuracy by scanning a photograph of a man or woman. But critics have slammed the software, saying it could be used to'out' men and women currently in the closet. Software was used to make composite faces. On left are faces'least likely' to be homosexual, and center are faces'most likely' to be homosexual.

A new computer algorithm, developed by researchers at Stanford University, can correctly determine someone's sexuality with up to 91% accuracy just by analysing a photo of their face. It's the robotic equivalent of a "gaydar" and it's sure to stir up a minefield of discussion, but first, a few caveats. The study used 35,326 photos from a US dating site and the artificial intelligence only distinguished sexuality between two photos (always one straight, one homosexual) of people of the same gender – the study did not include transgender or bisexual people. The photos used were portraits of faces, so the AI's judgments are made based on a "faceprint" determined from things like eyebrows, cheeks, hairline, neckline and nose, rather than clothing or hairstyle. Among men the system was accurate 81% of the time, and with women it was 71% accurate, but when given repeated photos of the same man (and so, more data) the accuracy increased to 91%.

A computer program can tell if someone is gay or not with a high level of accuracy by looking at a photograph, a study claims. But critics say that the software could be used to'out' men and women currently in the closet. To'train' their computer, the researchers downloaded 130,741 different images of 36,630 individual men's faces, and 170,360 images of 38,593 women from a US dating website. The users had all declared their sexuality on their profiles. Removing images which were not clear enough, they were left with even numbers of 35,326 pictures of 14,776 people, gay and straight, male and female.

Maths is the language of science. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, maths is also increasingly integral to biology. Computer scientist and World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was one of the first to suggest that biological phenomena could be studied and understood mathematically. In 1952 he proposed a pair of mathematical equations which provide an explanation for how pigmentation patterns might form on animals' coats For hundreds of years mathematics has been used, to great effect, to model relatively simple physical systems. Newton's universal law of gravitation is a fine example.

It can be a sore point for evolutionary biologists who study sexual selection. In the popular coverage of evolution, mate choice too often gets overlooked, in the shadow of natural selection. Yale biologist Richard O. Prum's new book responds to this imbalance. Prum is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale. Over the years he has conducted detailed field studies of multiple bird species and their mating habits all around the world.

It is fitting that the greatest code-breaker of World War Two remains a riddle a hundred years after his birth. Alan Turing, the brilliant, maverick mathematician, widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, invented an electromagnetic machine called the'bombe' which formed the basis for deciphering Germany's Enigma codes. The man himself has rather eluded definition: painted (too easily) as a nutty professor with a squeaky voice; as a quirky, haphazard character with a sloppy appearance by his mother and schoolmasters; by colleagues as a gruff, socially awkward man; and by his friends as an open-hearted, generous and gentle soul. The crucial contribution Turing made at Bletchley Park, one that has been credited with shortening the war by two years and saving countless lives, did not become public knowledge until twenty years after his death. His mother, brother and friends did not know until long after they'd mourned him, the extent of his heroism.