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Twitter Says Its Image Cropping Algorithm Was Biased, So It Extends It

Inside something blog post On Wednesday, Rumman Chowdhury, software design manager for Twitter’s machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability group, wrote that the company felt the algorithm was biased after testing it for groups related to gender and race. Publish and attached research document In detail, the way the cropping system was tested with randomly linked images of people of different races and genders favored whites over, say, blacks and women over men.-

Twitter’s conclusion comes months after the company said he is investigating the algorithm, and it is another example of how biases can be hidden in computer systems designed to perform tasks that people often do exceptionally well. –

“We considered the tradeoffs between the speed and consistency of automatic cultivation and the potential risks that we saw in this study,” Chowdhury wrote. “One of our conclusions is that not everyone on Twitter is a good candidate for the algorithm, and in this case, people’s best decision is to crop the image.”

In March, Twitter began testing a new way to display the full image, rather than an automatically cropped preview, on mobile devices when a user tweets a single image. The company said that after the positive feedback introduced the feature to all its iOS and Android users in May. (However, it centers very long or wide images.) –

A Twitter spokesperson told CNN Business on Wednesday that the change came first on the Twitter mobile app because most people hide and view images.



Once the image cropping algorithm was implemented, every time a user posted an image to Twitter, the automated system would crop a preview version of the image that viewers would see before clicking on the full-size image. Twitter said in its blog post in 2018 that it used facial recognition in the past to help figure out how images are cropped in previews.

However, the facial recognition software was prone to errors. The company rejected this approach and instead had its software at home in the so-called images. In the “Salacy” area or the area that was considered most interesting to the person viewing the big picture. Cellularity is studied by observing what people look at; we tend to be interested in people, animals, and text, for example.

Last September, the company was asked to explore an algorithmic approach to cropping images after being reviewed by numerous Tweets. These included one from Twitter user @bascule, who on September 19 has tweeted“Experimenting with a horrible experiment … Which Twitter algorithm do you choose: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama?” In addition to his words, there were two long, rectangular pictures. The first consisted of a photo of McConnell, the United States Senate Majority Leader, in a thin white and white rectangle in the middle, and at the bottom, a photo of former United States President Obama, which is black. The other was the opposite, Obama at the top and McConnell at the bottom. When Twitter’s image cropping algorithm is enabled, preview versions of images running in parallel only display McConnell.-

The day before, another Twitter user @colinmadland noticed a similar preview result when he posted a photo that he himself said was a white man alongside a photo of a black man he was attending an online meeting with; By default, the Twitter preview only shows a white male.-

In reply to @bascule at the time has tweeted It saw no race or gender biases during testing prior to the preview feature launch, but said it was investigating if there were any issues with the clipping algorithm.-

Chowdhury wrote in a blog post on Twitter Wednesday that the switch from using an algorithm to cropping images reduces a company’s reliance on machine learning (artificial intelligence, where the computer teaches itself by analyzing information) “a function with which we agree.

According to a Twitter spokesperson, the company plans to upload the image cropping algorithm to Twitter.com in the coming months. The algorithm is also used in two other ways, such as when a person tweets multiple images; A spokesperson said that Twitter is also working on improvements for these uses.

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