Guardian exclusive: AI tools rate photos of women as more sexually suggestive than those of men, especially if nipples, pregnant bellies or exercise is involved
mages posted on social media are analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms that decide what to amplify and what to suppress. Many of these algorithms, a Guardian investigation has found, have a gender bias, and may have been censoring and suppressing the reach of countless photos featuring women’s bodies., are meant to protect users by identifying violent or pornographic visuals so that social media companies can block it before anyone sees it.
One social media company said they do not design their systems to create or reinforce biases and classifiers are not perfect. The photo of the women got eight views within one hour, and the picture with the two men received 655 views, suggesting the photo of the women in underwear was either suppressed or shadowbanned.Shadowbanning has been documented for years, but the Guardian journalists may have found a missing link to understand the phenomenon: biased AI algorithms.platforms seem to leverage these algorithms to rate images and limit the reach of content that they consider too racy.
Screenshots of Microsoft’s platform in June 2021 , and in July 2021 . In the first version, there is a button to upload any photo and test the technology, which has disappeared in the later version.But what are these AI classifiers actually analyzing in the photos? More experiments were needed, so Mauro agreed to be the test subject.
Ideally, tech companies should have conducted thorough analyses on who is labeling their data, to make sure that the final dataset embeds a diversity of views, she said. The companies should also check that their algorithms perform similarly on photos of men v women and other groups, but that is not always done.This gender bias the Guardian uncovered is part of more than a decade of controversy around content moderation on social media.
Google and Microsoft rated Wood’s photos as likely to contain explicit sexual content. Amazon categorized the image of the pregnant belly on the right as ‘explicit nudity’. Running some of Wood’s photos through the AI algorithms of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, including those featuring a pregnant belly got rated as racy, nudity or even explicitly sexual.
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