Twitter offers $3,500 'bounty' to users who find algorithmic bias, like cropping out Black people

Twitter is offering a cash reward to users who can help it weed out bias in its photo-cropping algorithm. The social-media platform announced'bounties' as high as $3,500 as part of this week's DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas. 'Finding bias in machine learning models is difficult, and sometimes, companies find out about unintended ethical harms once they've already reached the public,' Rumman Chowdhury and Jutta Williams of Twitter's Machine-Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) project said in a blog post. 'We want to change that.' The challenge was inspired by how researchers and hackers often point out security vulnerabilities to companies, Chowdhury and Williams explained.