Racism in thumbnails: Twitter prohibits artificial intelligence from cropping images

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"Potential for bias": According to its own tests on the allegations of racism against its artificial intelligence, Twitter offers users more options to crop images

Photo: REGIS DUVIGNAU / REUTERS

Twitter wants to take control of artificial intelligence (AI) out of control when it comes to cropping preview photos.

The US short message service announced on Thursday.

Instead, users should already have more options when composing the message to determine for themselves how their pictures will look later in a tweet.

A blog post by the company states: "We hope that we can reduce the risk of disadvantage by giving users more options to crop the images and see what the photos will look like as they tweet."

The company is reacting to the allegation that the software is racist and disadvantages black people, among others, in tweet previews.

Its own users made Twitter aware of this discrimination about two weeks ago.

Also biased with Simpsons characters and dogs

To prove the imbalanced selection of images, a programmer, among others, tested the algorithm with images of the two US politicians Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell in various constellations.

It did not matter whether the former president was placed above or below on a strip of images.

The Twitter AI previewed the white McConnell each time.

Even with comic characters from the series "The Simpsons" the algorithm failed and each time it selected the yellow character Lenny instead of the black colleague Carl for the timeline view.

Even dogs with dark fur had no chance to appear in the preview.

The Twitter algorithm preferred bright animals.

The short message service simulated such tests on the highlighting algorithm.

While the analysis showed "no bias across races or genders," "we found that there is potential for bias in the way we crop photos," said Twitter.

"We should have done a better job by considering that possibility when we designed and developed the feature."

Twitter introduced automatic image cropping around two years ago to automatically adjust objects in images in the timeline preview.

Instead of showing clipped cat bodies, the software put the animal heads in focus.

A snapshot from the window of an airplane no longer only showed the sky, but instead focused on the wing.

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