Twitter's AI bounty program reveals bias toward young, pretty white people

Twitter's first bounty program for AI bias has wrapped up, and there are already some glaring issues the company wants to address. CNET reports that grad student Bogdan Kulynych has discovered that photo beauty filters skew the Twitter saliency (importance) algorithm's scoring system in favor of slimmer, younger and lighter-skinned (or warmer-toned) people. The findings show that algorithms can "amplify real-world biases" and conventional beauty expectations, Twitter said. Halt AI learned that Twitter's saliency algorithm "perpetuated marginalization" by cropping out the elderly and people with disabilities. Researcher Roya Pakzad, meanwhile, found that the saliency algorithm prefers cropping Latin writing over Arabic.