Twitter is starting a new initiative called Responsible Machine Learning (ML) to study if and how its artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) systems are racially and gender-wise biased. The official Twitter statement stated that the move was to study any "unintentional harms" caused by its algorithms since the social media giant is still in its early in the AI and ML journey.

"When Twitter uses ML, it can impact hundreds of millions of Tweets per day and sometimes, the way a system was designed to help could start to behave differently than was intended," said Jutta Williams and Rumman Chowdhury from Twitter.

"These subtle shifts can then start to impact the people using Twitter and we want to make sure we're studying those changes and using them to build a better product," they said in a statement late on Thursday.

The 'Responsible ML' group is an interdisciplinary team of people who come from different subjects including technical, research, trust and safety, and product teams.

"Leading this work is our ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team: a dedicated group of engineers, researchers, and data scientists collaborating across the company to assess downstream or current unintentional harms in the algorithms we use and to help Twitter prioritise which issues to tackle first," the company elaborated.

The outcome of the exercise will help Twitter understand ML's impact, conduct deeper analysis and studies to understand the existence of its AI's potential to harm the users and feeds. The 'Responsible ML' group will undertake analysis on the basis of gender and racial bias of its image cropping (saliency) algorithm, a fairness study of what difference racial groups see on the recommendations on the 'Home' timeline and an evaluation of content recommendations for different political ideologies across seven countries.

"The most impactful applications of responsible ML will come from how we apply our learnings to build a better Twitter," the company said. The outcome will have an impact on how Twitter employs AI and ML since the company has stated that given the outcomes, it may also come to a decision to remove algorithms or alter their product while giving the users more control over the images they tweet.

Twitter also explained that as an effort to inform people about its algorithms and the impact that ML has on the platform, the company will also build explainable ML solutions.