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"We began testing a new way to display standard aspect ratio photos... without the saliency algorithm crop. The goal of this was to give people more control ove
by Areibman 5y ago
"We began testing a new way to display standard aspect ratio photos... without the saliency algorithm crop. The goal of this was to give people more control over how their images appear while also improving the experience of people seeing the images in their timeline. After getting positive feedback on this experience, we launched this feature to everyone."
So the solution all along was to give users the ability to crop their own photos. Why wasn't this the original way of doing things?
Instead of forcing a complicated algorithm into the Twitter experience, it seems to me that the solution all along was just to let users do what they do best-- make tweets for themselves. This incident strikes me as a major failing of AI: We are so eager to shoehorn AI/ML into our products that we lose sight of what actually makes users happy.
- ggggtez 5y ago> Why wasn't this the original way of doing things? Someone wanted to do a feature so they could get promoted. Probably with some mumbo jumbo about how it reduces the number of clicks to create a tweet and thus increases revenue.
- cblconfederate 5y agoNext they'll tell us that chronological mode is better! (it is for me in any case)
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI like it better too. And fortunately the setting doesn’t seem to be reverted at random as frequently as it used to.
- bobbylarrybobby 5y agoWhat’s really remarkable is that giving users the ability to manually crop would be an amazing way to gather data on optimal cropping, which they could have used to train their model down the road. I can only imagine how much more time and money went into gathering eye tracking data.
- akersten 5y agoIf you were trying for real bias in your cropping algorithm, I would suspect training it on what the average, unconsciously-biased user thinks is the best crop nearly guarantees it.