From Yahoo.com…
A Twitter image-cropping algorithm that went viral last year when users discovered it preferred white people to Black people was also coded with implicit bias against a number of other groups, researchers have found.
Researchers looked at how the algorithm, which automatically edited photos to focus on people’s faces, dealt with a variety of different people and saw evidence that Muslims, people with disabilities and older people faced similar discrimination. The same artificial intelligence had learned to ignore people with white or gray hair, who wore headscarves for religious or other reasons, or who used wheelchairs, researchers said.
The findings were part of a first-of-its-kind contest hosted by Twitter over the weekend at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas. The company invited researchers to unearth new ways to prove that an image-cropping algorithm was inadvertently coded to be biased against particular groups of people. Twitter gave out cash prizes including $3,500 to the winner and small amounts for runners up.
It’s a unique step in what has become an important field of research: Finding ways that automated systems trained by existing data resources have become imbued with existing biases in society.
