Twitter's Photo Cropping AI Discriminates by Weight, Language and Age.

By Christian Maitre

10/5/21

THE INTERNET—Something I've been taught time and time again as a digital native, is that excessive social media use can cause body image issues. Constantly scrolling and seeing picture-perfect influencers and models with ideal bodies is extremely unhealthy, but this isn't breaking news. Previously in May Twitter found out that it's AI program for auto-cropping photos favored white women, when centering in on faces in photos. Now more recently a contest revealed that this same AI algorithm also was discriminating against weight,

language and age. If favored skinnier white woman who posted photos with captions using english and European languages. When a program meant to detect people and their words can't recognize them, it reveals that the creators of that program didn't have other people of that appearance/ background in mind when creating a "universal" auto-cropping tool.

What this shows is the actual bias and prejudices of the creators of the AI program. Social Media companies have a diversity problem, and that's not good. In 2020 57 percent of twitter employees were white males. In the same year white and asian employees made up 88 percent of Facebooks racial demographics. People and programs that work for these companies have access to our personal information, and they're statistically not working in diverse workplaces. Social media companies essentially manage and organize data that we want to share to the public using algorithms. It would benefit these companies greatly if they were EXTREMELY diverse, so that algorithms that help people broadcast their lives don't leave anyone behind.

From The Verge