Twitter's AI image-crop algo is biased towards people who look younger, skinnier, and whiter, bounty challenge at DEF CON reveals

Twitter’s image-cropping AI algorithm favors people who appear younger, thinner, and have fairer skin as well as those that are able-bodied.

The saliency algorithm is used to automatically crop pictures posted on the social media platform. It focuses on the most interesting parts of the image to catch people’s attention as they scroll through their Twitter feeds. Last year, netizens discovered the tool preferred photographs of women over men, and those with lighter skin over darker skin.

Engineers at Twitter’s ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team, later confirmed these biases. In an attempt to discover other potential flaws in its image cropping algorithm, the group sponsored an algorithmic bias bounty competition hosted at this year’s DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas and organised by AI Village, a community of hackers and data scientists working at the intersection of machine learning and security.

The top three results announced this week revealed Twitter’s saliency algorithm preferred people who appeared more conventionally attractive, English over Arabic, and was more likely to crop out people in wheelchairs.

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