Published in AI

Twitter crops out black people

by on20 May 2021


AI is racist

Twitter’s image-cropping algorithm appears to have a problem with race and tends to delete  black people from the frame.

It is not just racist, it does not like men generally and tends to crop them out too.

Twitter said that the decision about cropping an image is a decision best made by people.

The study by three of its machine learning researchers was conducted after user criticism last year about image previews in posts excluding black people's faces.

It found an eight percent difference from demographic parity in favour of women and a four percent favour toward white individuals.

The paper cited several reasons, including issues with image backgrounds and eye colour, but said none were an excuse.

"Machine learning-based cropping is fundamentally flawed because it removes user agency and restricts user's expression of their own identity and values, instead of imposing a normative gaze about which part of the image is considered the most interesting", the researchers wrote.

Twitter recently started showing standard aspect ratio photos in full - without any crop - on its mobile apps and is trying to expand that effort.

One thing which would be a relief is that a belief that crops favoured women's bodies overheads, reflecting what is known as the "male gaze", proved to be untrue.

The findings are another example of the disparate impact from artificial intelligence systems including demographic biases identified in facial recognition and text analysis, the paper said.

Last modified on 20 May 2021
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