#sexism
Twitter’s Algorithm Found to Favor Photos of Young, Pretty White People
Twitter has wrapped its first bounty program for artificial intelligence bias on the platform, and the results have highlighted an issue that has been noted as a problem in the past.
According to a report from CNET, researcher Bogdan Kulynych (who took home the $3,500 prize) has found that an important algorithm on the platform tends to favor faces of people who "look slim and young and with skin that is lighter-colored or with warmer tones." This discovery (which is not exactly new news) shows that the Twitter "saliency" (importance) scoring system can amplify real-world biases and conventional -- and often unrealistic -- beauty expectations.
The company sponsored the bounty program to find problems in the saliency algorithm it employs to crop images shared on the platform so they fit in the preview pane of the Twitter timeline. It was discovered more than a year ago there was a problem with this automated service, and just a few months ago the company announced that it was "axing" AI photo cropping altogether.
2nd place goes to @halt_ai who found the saliency algorithm perpetuated marginalization. For example, images of the elderly and disabled were further marginalized by cropping them out of photos and reinforcing spatial gaze biases.
-- Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) August 9, 2021
While the use of AI has taken a lot of grunt work out of messy subjects such as captioning and subtitling videos, identifying spam mail, identifying faces or fingerprints to unlock devices, and more, the thing to remember is these programs are made and trained by real people using real-world data. As such, the data can be biased by real-world problems, so identifying and addressing these AI bias problems has become a booming industry in the computing world.
“The saliency algorithm works by estimating what a person might want to see first within a picture so that our system could determine how to crop an image to an easily viewable size. Saliency models are trained on how the human eye looks at a picture as a method of prioritizing what’s likely to be most important to the most people," writes Twitter software engineering director Rumman Chowdhury.
“The algorithm, trained on human eye-tracking data, predicts a saliency score on all regions in the image and chooses the point with the highest score as the center of the crop.”
This bias was not the only issue discovered with the algorithm during the bounty program, as the algorithm was also "perpetuated marginalization" by cropping people out of images that were disabled, elderly, and even cut out any writing in Arabic. Researchers taking part in the program further found that the light-skinned bias even extends towards the emojis used.
Bogdan Kulynych - Predicted maximum saliency: 3.5501 → 4.7940 (135.04% increase)
Even though the company addressed the AI system's bias, Kulynych's findings show the problem goes even deeper.
"The target model is biased towards the depictions of people that appear slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture, and with stereotypically feminine facial traits. This bias could result in the exclusion of minoritized populations and perpetuation of stereotypical beauty standards in thousands of images."
Twitter hasn't said how soon it will address the algorithm bias (if it will at all), but all of this comes to light as the backlash of "beauty filters" has been mounting, which critics say the filters tend to create an unrealistic standard of beauty in images. It will be interesting to see if the company decides to take an official stance on the topic one way or the other, especially since it has a history of remaining mostly neutral on the content that is shared on the platform.
For those interested, Twitter has published the code for winning entries.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
#culture #news #ai #artificialintelligence #bias #elderly #issues #marginalization #racebias #sexism #socialmedia #twitter #twitterbounty
Vegans Protesting In Lingerie @Stefania Ferrario and @V-gan Booty - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T32LLKoK3z4
#vegan #vegetarian #sexy #sexism #feminism #animalrights #model #meat #milk #eggs #food #animals
There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. In the case of gender, the barely defeated Equal Rights Amendment put it succinctly: “Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. Nor should anyone invoke sex differences to justify discriminatory policies or to hector women into doing what they don’t want to do.
Steven Pinker (b. 1954) Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, author
The Blank Slate, Part 5, ch. 18 (2002)
#quotation #quote #battle-of-the-sexes #discrimination #equal-rights #equality #feminism #gender-equality #humanity #men #sexism #women
More notes and sourcing on WIST: https://wist.info/pinker-steven/47541/
The Guide to Allyship
An open source starter guide to help you become a more thoughtful and effective ally.
To be an Ally is to:
- Take on the struggle as your own.
- Transfer the benefits of your privilege to those who lack it.
- Amplify voices of the oppressed before your own.
- Acknowledge that even though you feel pain, the conversation is not about you.
- Stand up, even when you feel scared.
- Own your mistakes and de-center yourself.
- Understand that your education is up to you and no one else.
dear follow #diasporians
i have the hint, there will soon come a wave of #maga - #trumpsters accounts to #diaspora, the older of you might remember on the #wave of #daesh - and #isis accounts yeras ago, when #twitter #silenced their accounts and i think, the #antifa -fellows here in diaspora , the diasporians who have no sympathy to trump or his #whitepower -footsoldiers, the people here, who dont sympathizes with #racism #fascism #homophobia #sexism or (yes, you read right, i wrote OR! which says a lot about this time) #antisemitism the #liberals here, we should be prepared and think about, how to counter that, i dont want diaspora to become the brown echochamber for #conspiracy-ideology, for that #qanon lunacy or this #trump -bullshit
share that, think about that, debate about that, stopping #fascism when you can, not, when its allready to late, #antifascists predicted that allready years ago and itz no #fun anymore, itz no fun, to play #cassanda and beeing right #now itz the time to defeat #fascist #hatespeech here on diaspora, not tomorow, not next week, ITZ NOW!
this is a call to your keyboards!
please share!
you get a funny, hopefully prophetic picture as reward
ps if you want to support the cause and you think i missed important points, feel free to rephrase that posting or write something in the comments or a pm, feel free to "follow"me (maybe a little warning, i am an antifa, i am really i left wing communist and i am a pro-zionist and i am a militant, we can argue about that, we can have debates or, if you dont like that, make your own post about it, if itz antifascist, i will support it, i love you!)
I hate being called smart. Not because I believe it’s false, not out any sort of modesty, but because of what usually follows. Because usually when someone is saying I’m smart, or observing just how smart I am, it’s usually followed by one of two things — how I’m squandering my potential, or their jealousy because they want to feel smarter than me.
I was the gifted child. The one who read above her grade level, who took to things easily, who could come up with the clever ideas. I was the one the straight A students wanted in their lab group in high school, but didn’t have the time of the day for me outside of class. But my grades were always on the brink of failing or only just passing. I didn’t want to pay attention in class, I didn’t bother to study for tests. Why wasn’t I trying?
In elementary school, I was singled out for a special class. I was told it was an advanced class, and it meant I got to leave my regular class and go to another class room for specialized lessons with a few other students. That didn’t last long, and no one ever told me why at the time. Years later, my mother commented on it, implying she felt it would have been a hindrance to me—that it was for students with special needs—so she’d fought it tooth and nail with the school administration. I still wonder what might have happened if I’d been allowed to continue with those lessons.
Homework was always a fight — more often than not it felt like busy work and I couldn’t find anything helpful about it. So I just didn’t do it. Well into high school, I didn’t bother to study and did well enough on tests without the need to. And when I finally started to hit subjects that didn’t come easily to me? I had never learned how to study, because no one bothered to ask why I wasn’t doing my homework, they’d just get angry. At home it was always “get your homework done or you can’t…” and I’d just spend all night staring at homework and hiding in my room. At school, teachers would talk to me bewildered that I was getting such good scores on tests, contributing well to class discussions, but I was constantly just not turning in homework and my grades were always on the brink of failure.
A couple of my teachers were cool about it, a couple of my favorites in fact. My German teacher would let you write in your answers during in class discussion when the homework was due, and you’d at least get partial credit. There’s something to be said about learning through repetition, and writing down the answers was better study than just not doing the homework. And then there was my scifi/fantasy lit teacher. You could literally turn in any assignment as late as the last day of the semester, and he had a sliding scale on how much credit you lost depending on how late it was — the highest you could get was a C for a perfect paper once you reached a certain point. This was a large weight on him, especially since all his tests were essay tests, and he’d have those to grade at the same time as all this late partial credit work.
As I moved into the world beyond school, things only got worse. I attempted classes at the local community college, and when I encountered a lot of frustrations, I threw my hands up and gave up on it. My dad threatened to start charging me rent if I didn’t go back to school, and that backfired on both of us because I said fuck it and started paying him rent when I’m pretty sure his goal had been to get me to engage with college.
I spent years working retail, which was a maddening meat grinder. Managers under pressure to meet utterly unreasonable goals set for the enrichment of the company shareholders, a lot of them highly unqualified to be leading people because the ones who are qualified usually either languish at the lower levels of the pecking order because they can’t ‘yes sir’ well enough, or quickly move onto better paying jobs that are less meat grinder. Those of us who make the mistake of showing any sort of potential, without the follow through to either get the fuck out or claw our way up to management, get taken advantage of. After my first manager, who was an amazing and caring woman, got the fuck out of the store and moved onto better things, I worked for a series of men who were always happy to sing my praise until I pushed back or had a bad day. Then they’d come down on me like the hellfire of a million suns.
Even though you could probably start to pick out the signs of ADHD as far back as elementary school, the difference in how girls are socialized and how it manifests, meant that even I hadn’t been aware something was different about me. I just thought I was being stubborn and lazy, because that’s what the parents and later authority figures told me. Retail is such a high stress environment, especially the further and further we work our way towards this pending collapse of capitalism, I just assumed that I wasn’t cut out for the work. Even when I actually knew my shit, I was good at what I did, but I couldn’t measure up.
My first job was at Radio Shack, and I lost count of the number of times I had customers talk down to me when they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, turn to coworkers who knew less than me, and then had to watch as said coworker had to turn to me to ask me to answer the question. But I was a bad employee because my dollar per ticket wasn’t high enough, I didn’t sell enough of the bullshit extended warranties (they weren’t worth it on anything other than headphones, tbh), I didn’t attach enough accessories when I sold cell phones… never mind that half my shift would be spent supporting my coworkers when the customers would go to them instead of me because my boobs apparently meant I couldn’t know about computers and patch cables and batteries and shit. Then when I moved to OfficeMax, my background in all that shit helped me be one of the best sales people with the office equipment, but again, I’d end up helping coworkers and my numbers would suffer, or I’d be given special tasks (like setting up the ad every week) but still be held to the same sales expectations as my coworkers who didn’t have to do this shit too.
When I finally got out of retail, it was such a fucking relief, and I thought all my problems would go away. And for a while it felt like they had, because I was still running on the high stress mode that retail had put me into, so I was expending twice the energy I should have to in order to compensate for all the things I could never get right. Eventually though, shit went south with that job too. I would lose focus on shit, fail to remember to do small tasks that should have been easy to remember, having to constantly write shit down or I’d forget. I’d get yelled at when the printers fucked up, even if they were repeating issues that Xerox continued to fail to fix, because I was supposed to be watching every fucking print that came off the machine while running multiple machines at once. Like, seriously? This really became a problem when the machines started getting fast enough that if I loaded enough paper for a job, started it, and turned to another machine, I could have fifty or more double sided color prints that were bad just in the time it took me to set up the second machine to start running and get the first proof off it.
Bonus round was when a coworker was harassing me, I went to the bosses about it, and I got blown off. I was told by one that ‘everyone has their issues’ and he proceeded to compare my leaving the shop silently at the end of the day, instead of saying goodbye, to the coworker’s harassment. The other boss told me that coworker just wanted to be my friend, and got pissed when I called him on that bullshit — because telling a woman that a man harassing her just wants to be her friend, and she should give him a chance is exactly that, sexist shit. I’m still not sure if either of them realized that was the final straw on my relationship with them. If I’d been in the mental state necessary to really effectively job hunt, and if there was a market that actually would pay a woman without a college degree anything resembling a living wage, I would have been long gone from the place by then. But the fucking cherry on top with that shit? They ended up firing the coworker a few months later, over other issues, and after he’d been gone for a while, one of them commented they wish they’d known sooner about coworker’s problems… then was bewildered when I stomped the fuck out of the room without saying a word. Yeah.
They sold off the business and retired a year ago, and the new boss is around my age. So far he seems to be fairly understanding who I am, and how my brain works. So work’s been a better place for me, even as we all have growing pains from his having to learn the ropes and everyone adjusting to the changes. But he and I sat down for my year end review… and he dropped that smart bomb on me — “You’re probably the smartest person here” is what he said to me, then proceeded to point out my failing to live up to my potential. And I voiced my concern over that pattern because of all the shit I laid out in this blog post… but I couldn’t really drop all that in the meeting, so I glossed over it and gave him the tl;dr instead. I’m not sure if he fully understood the depth of my concern. So, we’ll see how this plays out.
All this ranting to say, I really am starting to think I’m ADHD. I read people talk about it, and I go ‘that sounds like me!’ But they also talk about how hard it is to get a diagnosis as both an adult and a woman, and I already have enough issues following through on shit, especially medical shit I know I need to handle. So, I’m like… self medicate with caffeine and use the fuck out of reminders and timers on my phone, and hope for the best. Yay team. >.>
#adhd #rut #sexism #smart
Originally posted at: https://deathkitten.net/2020/01/smart/
[…]
Celebrities posing #naked while #pregnant began as a fiercely defiant and provocative stunt. #Demi_Moore’s 1991 Vanity Fair cover—an undeniably confident woman fully #nude, cradling her pregnant belly—was #progressive in its mere existence: the overt #sexualization and #celebration of a #bodyImage that the #American public had, generally, been taught not to think of as #sexy.
It was a transgressive moment in its #controversy (in 1991, many more #conservative people were none-too-pleased to see a nude pregnant #woman staring at them from the shelves of the grocery store cashier aisle), but also in how it paved the way for the image to eventually become #uncontroversial almost entirely; to be #normalized.
(Go figure something as #natural as a pregnant woman’s body needs to be normalized. #Humans are awful.)
In the decades since Moore’s cover, the nude pregnant #photo has almost become a rudimentary rite of passage for celebrities, especially those whose careers were built on—and at times #exploited—their sexuality. #Christina_Aguilera, #Jessica_Simpson, #Britney_Spears, #Nia_Long, #Cindy_Crawford, #Claudia_Schiffer, #Mariah_Carey, #Monica_Bellucci: the nude photo shoot evolved from #progressive act of #rebellion to an #essential part of the Pregnant Celebrity Publicity Tour. As essential, even, as the “Check Out My Post-Baby Bod!” photo shoot that would typically follow.
It’s easy—and at this point #lazy and #unoriginal—to #attack any news Kardashian makes as a #shameless ploy for more press. The fact of the matter is that Kardashian has built a #career as an expert #manipulator of a #realityTV genre that’s mandated that #media take its stars #seriously, because the many #fans of these shows already do.
She’s an aficionado of #branding, a polarizing #fashion maven, and, after years in the public eye, a bona fide #cultural #influencer.
As such, Kardashian’s treatment of her #celebrity spotlight has #matured along with our #perception of her #influence. She’s no longer the #girl made famous by the #sexTape, but a #person with a #platform who is given a megaphone to speak about #feminism, #sexism, #sexualizing, and, god help us, real things.
There’s something sort of #admirable about this #evolution.
[…]
Kim Kardashian Posts Bold, Beautiful Naked Pregnant Selfie to Combat Body Shaming
#Kim_Kardashian #socialMedia #bodyShaming #bodyPositivity #iPutTheHeadlineAtTheBottomBecauseRegardlessOfHowEnlightenedWeConsiderOurselvesItGoesWithoutSayingThatIfSomeOfYouSawHerNameAtTheTopYouWouldHaveCompletelyIgnoredThisPost
