A.I. Scans your Brain, then Generates Faces you’ll Find Attractive

Imagine if some not-too-distant future version of Tinder was able to crawl inside your brain and extract the features you find most attractive in a potential mate, then scan the romance-seeking search space to seek out whichever partner possessed the highest number of these physical attributes.

We’re not just talking qualities like height and hair color, either, but a far more complex equation based on a dataset of everyone you’ve ever found attractive before. In the same way that the Spotify recommendation system learns the songs you enjoy and then suggests others that conform to a similar profile — based on features like danceability, energy, tempo, loudness, and speechiness — this hypothetical algorithm would do the same for matters of the heart. Or, at least, the loins. Call it physical attractiveness matchmaking by way of A.I.

To be clear, Tinder isn’t — as far as I’m aware — working on anything remotely like this. But researchers from the University of Helsinki and Copenhagen University are. And while that description might smack somewhat of a dystopian shallowness pitched midway between Black Mirror and Love Island, in reality their brain-reading research is pretty darn fascinating.