Skip to main content

Twitter issues cash bounty challenge for undoing 'racist' photo cropping

By
Twitter is inviting hackers to take a look under one algorithm's hood.

Twitter just issued a new challenge that will pays people to actually do some good.

As part of the hacker conference DEF CON beginning Aug. 5, Twitter has announced a challenge to the hacking/coding community to help the company make the algorithm that crops the platform's photos less (apparently) racist.

For photos attached to tweets that are a larger or different shape than the thumbnail proportions, a Twitter algorithm chooses what portion of the image to show in the tweet's preview. In Sept. 2020, Twitter users pointed out that this algorithm appeared to more consistently show white faces than black faces when there was an odd-shaped image that contained both. Some described this as an instance of algorithmic bias, which is when racism intentionally or inadvertently gets baked into the decisions a computer makes.

In response, Twitter shared the way the algorithm worked, and said that it would look into the matter. But the algorithmic bias bounty program takes efforts to solve this problem a step further by financially incentivizing people to mitigate it.

Bug bounties are programs companies or other groups have that reward people (often, those outside the organizations) for finding bugs in their technical infrastructure. Bug bounties often focus on finding potential security breaches, and organizations pay bug bounty hunters for alerting them to the issues.

Twitter is taking this concept and applying it to the challenge of algorithmic bias in photo cropping. It will award $3,500 to a first place winner that can identify the cause of this apparent bias, plus $1,000 each for second place, "most innovative," and "Most Generalizable (i.e., applies to the most types of algorithms)," and $500 for third place.

The challenge is a neat use of the bug bounty model: Rather than apologizing and playing defense for an instance of algorithmic bias, Twitter is saying, we want proactive help. And we'll pay.

SEE ALSO: Twitter's giving away NFTs for free (it's hard to put a price on worthless)

"We want to take this work a step further by inviting and incentivizing the community to help identify potential harms of this algorithm beyond what we identified ourselves," Twitter's blog post announcing the challenge reads. "With this challenge we aim to set a precedent at Twitter, and in the industry, for proactive and collective identification of algorithmic harms."

The bounty program at this time is specific to the challenge of photo cropping. But the blog post announcing the challenge describes it as "Twitter’s first algorithmic bias bounty challenge." First, and maybe not last? Mashable has reached out to Twitter to learn whether it will launch more algorithmic bias bounties to hunt down bias in machine learning, and will update this when we hear back.



from Mashable https://ift.tt/37cZLdW
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Nintendo Switch has been the US’s bestselling console for 23 straight months

By
Photo by James Bareham / The Verge It’s been a good two years for the Nintendo Switch. According to Nintendo, the gaming tablet has been the bestselling console in the US for 23 straight months. And according to data from the NPD Group, it just had its best October ever, moving 735,926 units of both the Switch and Switch Lite in the US. The company says that represents a 136 percent increase compared to last year. To date, the Switch has sold 22.5 million units in the US, and last week Nintendo revealed that more than 68 million units have been sold globally . “We’re excited about our momentum,” says Nick Chavez, Nintendo of America’s SVP of sales and marketing. Chavez puts the company’s big October down to two main factors. One is a better supply of stock; this year in particular, it’s often been hard to find a Switch on store shelves. This has only been exacerbated by increased demand due to a combination of the pandemic and the breakout success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons . ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Instagram accidentally reinstated Pornhub’s banned account

By
After years of on-and-off temporary suspensions, Instagram permanently banned Pornhub’s account in September. Then, for a short period of time this weekend, the account was reinstated. By Tuesday, it was permanently banned again. “This was done in error,” an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As we’ve said previously, we permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies.” Instagram’s content guidelines prohibit  nudity and sexual solicitation . A Pornhub spokesperson told TechCrunch, though, that they believe the adult streaming platform’s account did not violate any guidelines. Instagram has not commented on the exact reasoning for the ban, or which policies the account violated. It’s worrying from a moderation perspective if a permanently banned Instagram account can accidentally get switched back on. Pornhub told TechCrunch that its account even received a notice from Instagram, stating that its ban had been a mistake (that message itse...
Post a Comment
Read more

MVP versus EVP: Is it time to introduce ethics into the agile startup model?

By
Anand Rao Contributor Share on Twitter Anand Rao is global head of AI at PwC . The rocket ship trajectory of a startup is well known: Get an idea, build a team and slap together a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can get in front of users. However, today’s startups need to reconsider the MVP model as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become ubiquitous in tech products and the market grows increasingly conscious of the ethical implications of AI augmenting or replacing humans in the decision-making process. An MVP allows you to collect critical feedback from your target market that then informs the minimum development required to launch a product — creating a powerful feedback loop that drives today’s customer-led business. This lean, agile model has been extremely successful over the past two decades — launching thousands of successful startups, some of which have grown into billion-dollar companies. However, building high-performing product...
Post a Comment
Read more