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Last fall, Canadian student Colin Madland noticed that Twitter’s automatic cropping algorithm continually selected his face—not his darker-skinned colleague’s—from photos of the pair to display in tweets. The episode ignited accusations of bias as a flurry of Twitter users published elongated photos to see whether the AI would choose the face of a white person over a Black person or if it focused on women’s chests over their faces.
At the time, a Twitter spokesperson said assessments of the algorithm before it went live in 2018 found no evidence of race or gender bias. Now, the largest analysis of the AI to date has found the opposite: that Twitter’s algorithm favors white people over Black people. That assessment also found that the AI for predicting the most interesting part of a photo does not focus on women’s bodies over women’s faces.