Twitter consistently centers image previews on whiter faces

https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1307440596668182528

by anonymfus • 6 years ago

67 11 6 years ago

slg2• 6 years ago

Perfect example of how not proactively making an algorithm anti-racist can yield results that end up being racist. If you train a machine learning algorithm on photos with predominantly white faces, your algorithm is going to think people with lighter skin are more important thank people with darker skin.

xyzzy_plugh• 6 years ago

Why are people downvoting this? The parent is correct. If you don't test your models adequately then they'll have holes like this one.

slg2• 6 years ago

HN doesn't like talking about race or numerous other "controversial" topics. This story is already flagged off the front page.

aaron695• 6 years ago

Because we are not children. We understand the idea training data can affect the results.

OP has no evidence for the incendiary accusation and Twitter denies it.

https://twitter.com/ZehanWang/status/1307461285811032066?s=2...

corrys• 6 years ago

This assessment sounds correct. The silver lining here is that engineers will pay more attention to algorithm biases in the future.

nokya• 6 years ago

Wow.

(nothing else to say)

tzs• 6 years ago

In case anyone else did not realize this and is as confused as I was, apparently you can attach more than one photo to a tweet, and Twitter will then show previews of all of them in a gallery. The previews are formed by taking some part of the original image. Clicking on any of the previews opens a view of the corresponding full image.

I knew about twitter taking a part of an image and using that for a preview, but had not realized that there could be more than one image in a tweet.

benmmurphy• 6 years ago

Consistent in the title is misleading because this is essentially n=1. The Twitter user did try to transform the image in order to produce a different result but we don’t know if there is something not race based in Mitch’s face that the algorithm prefer’s over Obama’s. We also don’t know if the user has cherry picked this example.

d0ne• 6 years ago

Why is this flagged?

Twitter consistently centers image previews on whiter faces

Related Stories