'I was shocked it was so easy': ​meet the professor who says facial recognition ​​can tell if you're gay

Psychologist Michal Kosinski says artificial intelligence can detect your sexuality and politics just by looking at your face. What if he's right?

Vladimir Putin was not in attendance, but his loyal lieutenants were. On 14 July last year, the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and several members of his cabinet convened in an office building on the outskirts of Moscow. On to the stage stepped a boyish-looking psychologist, Michal Kosinski, who had been flown from the city centre by helicopter to share his research. "There was Lavrov, in the first row," he recalls several months later, referring to Russia's foreign minister. "You know, a guy who starts wars and takes over countries." Kosinski, a 36-year-old assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, was flattered that the Russian cabinet would gather to listen to him talk. "Those guys strike me as one of the most competent and well-informed groups," he tells me. "They did their homework. They read my stuff."

Kosinski's "stuff" includes groundbreaking research into technology, mass persuasion and artificial intelligence (AI) - research that inspired the creation of the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Five years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, he showed how even benign activity on Facebook could reveal personality traits - a discovery that was later exploited by the data-analytics firm that helped put Donald Trump in the White House.