2024-03-20 17:23:54| Engadget
Picture the scene: Your date has gone well and you and your partner might sleep together. Like any safe adult, you assume there will be a conversation about STI status and the use of protection. Now imagine how you would feel if they asked to take a photo of your penis and upload it to a website youve never heard of. Thats the future of intimacy, as imagined by Calmara, a new service launched by mens health startup HeHealth.
HeHealth Website
Its press release suggests users take a picture of their partners penis so it can be run through a deep learning model for visual signs of sexually-transmitted infections. And while the website suggests users should wear protection, a banner atop the HeHealth sites describes the app as Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex. Mixed messages aside, you may notice some major issues with the pitch: That this only covers infections that present visually, and that its only designed to work with penises.
But even if that use case applies, you might not feel you can trust its conclusions once youve looked at the data. The Calmara website claims its scans are up to 90 percent accurate, saying its AI has been battle-tested by over 40,000 users. That figure doesnt match up to its press release, which says accuracy reaches 94.4 percent (a figure cited in this NSFW preprint paper submitted a week ago), but its FAQ says the accuracy ranges from 65 percent to 96 percent across various conditions. We've reached out to the company and want to learn more about the apparent discrepancy.
Calmara
Its not impossible for models to categorize visual information I reported on how systems like these look at images of cells to aid drug discovery. But there are plenty of reasons as to why visual information isnt going to be as reliable for an STI test. After all, plenty of conditions dont have visual symptoms and carriers can often be asymptomatic long after infection. The company admits to this in its FAQ, saying that the app is a first line of defense, not a full-on fortress. Not to mention that other factors, like the lighting, the particular health quirks youre scouting for and a rainbow of skin tones might tweak those [accuracy] numbers a bit. Even more alarming, the unpublished paper (which is riddled with typos) admits that a full 40 percent of its training dataset is comprised of "augmented" images, for instance "extracting specific visually recognizable disease patterns from the existing clinical image dataset and layering those patterns on top of images of health (sic) penises."
Calmara
The Calmara websites disclaimer says that its tools are for the purpose of promoting and supporting general wellness and a healthy lifestyle and are not to be used to diagnose, cure, treat, manage or prevent any disease or condition." Of course, if it really was intended as a general wellness tool, it probably wouldnt describe itself as Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex, would it.
It doesnt help that this is a system asking users to send pictures of their, or their partner's genitalia. Issues around consent and as writer Ella Dawson raised on Bluesky age verification, dont seem to have been considered. The company's promises that the data is locked in a "digital stronghold" lacks specifics about its security approach or how the data it obtains may be shared. But that hasnt stopped the company from suggesting that it could, in future, be integrated directly into dating apps.
Fundamentally, there are so many red flags and potential vectors for abuse and giving users a false sense of confidence that nobody should try using it.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/friends-dont-let-friends-use-an-ai-sti-test-162354796.html?src=rss
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