Forget the nightmare of cropping your photos so they look good on Twitter. The platform is now using AI to always show the best parts of your photos.
Here is a great example of what AI and machine learning should really be about: bringing a solution to things that can ruin the user experience, like badly cropped images on Twitter.
The company is releasing its new machine learning tool after months of developing it internally. When the team started working on the tool, it was aimed at cropping images to faces using facial recognition. But they soon realised that the tool should be doing much more, like cropping pictures of scenery, objects, vehicles and animals too.
Here came the concept of “cropping using saliency” (basically what is most important in a picture). Using data from several eye-tracking studies, Twitter started to train neural networks and other algorithms to predict what people might want to show in their pictures.
The results are surprising and very welcome. From now on, thanks to Twitter’s ML cropping tool, our feeds are finally going to make so much more sense…

Examples of before and after using Twitter’s AI-powered auto-cropper | Image: Twitter
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