my favorite thing about the twitter cropping discussion is that there& #39;s an incredibly low barrier. almost everyone is running their own tests. even if we don& #39;t have "explainability", we still have folk experimentation.

in case you missed it, here is one thread from 2019 cropping out women in AI, while putting yann "it& #39;s just the dataset" lecun in the foreground https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1307470107401170947">https://twitter.com/AnimaAnan...

i think today& #39;s discussion started with this thread about zoom& #39;s background removal feature, inadvertently demonstrating a similar bias on twitter https://twitter.com/colinmadland/status/1307130447671984129">https://twitter.com/colinmadl...

and then this is the one that exploded, showing a clear preference for mitch over obama. and showing a few variations that would inspire people to try their own experiments. https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1307440596668182528">https://twitter.com/bascule/s...

twitter has a paper on their cropping algorithm here https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05787.pdf">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.... and google has a saliency model on github https://github.com/PAIR-code/saliency">https://github.com/PAIR-code... but it& #39;s hard to imagine a better intervention to come out of this than "get everyone posting variations to interrogate the system"