Incident 103: Twitter’s Image Cropping Tool Allegedly Showed Gender and Racial Bias

Description: Twitter's photo cropping algorithm was revealed by researchers to favor white and women faces in photos containing multiple faces, prompting the company to stop its use on mobile platform.

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Alleged: Twitter developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Twitter Users , Twitter non-white users and Twitter non-male users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
103
Report Count
5
Incident Date
2020-09-18
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

GMF Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Known AI Goal

Image Cropping

Known AI Technology

Neural Network

Known AI Technical Failure

Generalization Failure

Potential AI Technical Failure

Distributional Bias, Incomplete Data Attribute Capture

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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