Twitter says it is making an inquiry into why the neural network it uses to generate photo previews chooses to show white people’s faces more frequently than Black faces. The issue caused a row on Twitter over the weekend as several users found the revelation racist.
Twitter users demonstrated the issue by posting examples of posts with a Black person’s face and a white person’s face. Twitter’s preview showed the white faces a lot more often.
Trying a horrible experiment…
Which will the Twitter algorithm pick: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama? pic.twitter.com/bR1GRyCkia
— Tony “Abolish (Pol)ICE” Arcieri 🦀 (@bascule) September 19, 2020
Twitter uses a neural network to automatically crop photo previews instead of facial recognition. The company’s machine learning researchers explained in a blog post that they found facial recognition lacking in cropping images, mainly because not all images have a face.
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The company’s chief design officer, Dantley Davis tweeted that the company was investigating the neural network. He also conducted some unscientific tests with images.
Here’s another example of what I’ve experimented with. It’s not a scientific test as it’s an isolated example, but it points to some variables that we need to look into. Both men now have the same suits and I covered their hands. We’re still investigating the NN. pic.twitter.com/06BhFgDkyA
— Dantley 🔥✊🏾💙 (@dantley) September 20, 2020
Twitter communications team’s Liz Kelley tweeted that the company had tested for bias but found no evidence of racial or gender bias in its testing. “It’s clear that we’ve got more analysis to do. We’ll open source our work so others can review and replicate,” Kelley tweeted.
The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Parag Agrawal, also tweeted that the model needed ‘continuous improvement’ and he was ‘eager to learn’ from the experiments.
This is a very important question. To address it, we did analysis on our model when we shipped it, but needs continuous improvement.
Love this public, open, and rigorous test — and eager to learn from this. https://t.co/E8Y71qSLXa
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) September 20, 2020
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