Twitter’s photo-cropping algorithm prefers young, beautiful, and light-skinned faces

Results from the company’s AI bias competition are revealing — and helpful

Twitter has announced the results of an open competition to find algorithmic bias in its photo-cropping system. The company disabled automatic photo-cropping in March after experiments by Twitter users last year suggested it favored white faces over Black faces. It then launched an algorithmic bug bounty to try and analyze the problem more closely.

The competition has confirmed these earlier findings. The top-placed entry showed that Twitter’s cropping algorithm favors faces that are “slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture, and with stereotypically feminine facial traits.” The second and third-placed entries showed that the system was biased against people with white or grey hair, suggesting age discrimination, and favors English over Arabic script in images. Continue reading

(Image Credits: theverge.com)