After having fired two prominent AI ethics researchers earlier this year, at Google I/O last week Google put its best face forward by highlighting its “More equitable camera” initiative, aimed at improving its own camera and imaging products with a focus on making images of people of color “more beautiful and more accurate.”

These changes will come to Google’s own Pixel smartphone cameras this fall, and the company says it will also share what it learns across the broader Android ecosystem.

At the Snap Partner Summit last week, Snap disclosed how it is making its camera app more inclusive, including by improving Snapchat’s selfie camera to better capture low light by making adjustments to the front flash.

As Snapchat’s camera functionality also includes image creation and AR effects, non-biased image capture is extra crucial. Hence, Snapchat’s "Inclusive camera" initiative is broader than just capturing dark skin as well as light skin. It also includes identifying and removing a range of biased assumptions (for instance, that smaller, thinner noses are better) when automatically adjusting people's appearance.

Twitter shared the results of an internal study of the workings of its AI-based auto-cropping features, which showed racial and gender biases. Its underlaying AI algorithms were trained on human eye-tracking data and significantly favored white individuals over black people, and women over men.

Still don’t trust the social media networks’ initiatives to eliminate biases in their AI imaging tools? Or don’t trust face recognition software in the hands of certain government agencies or enterprises?

On the academic side of the spectrum, last week two methods were presented at the International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR) that leverage adversarial attacks to spoof AI or prevent detection by facial recognition software.

Tools based on these methods make tiny changes to an image that are not visible to the human eye but can confuse an imaging AI tool (they "cloak"), forcing the software to make a mistake in identifying the person or the object in the image, or, even stopping it from realizing the image is a selfie. The Fawkes tool can be downloaded here. The LowKey solution can be tested here.

Snapchat now has 500M monthly active users, 40% of Snap's users these days residing outside of North America and Europe – apparently finally having an up to par Android version of their apps is paying off!

Each day 5 billion pictures are taken by using Snapchat's camera app.

Google Photos. Creating phodeos. Google announces the ability to create animated photos from just 2 similar still shots by using its AI smartness to add transitional frames. (More about the trends behind hybrid photo/video formats in our Videos and Phodeos study).

Vimeo. IPO. Congratulations to video solution provider Vimeo, which went public yesterday, while spinning off from IAC. Vimeo previously acquired Visual 1st presenter Magisto and is looking to acquire more video startups in the future, according to CEO Anjali Sud. Vimeo has more than 200M users and as of the end of March had 1.6M paying subscribers, up 25% year over year. Its first day of trading was disappointing: down 12.8% from its price when it was trading on when-issued basis last week but still …. Giving it a market capitalization of about $7.2 billion.

Zenfolio. BookMe. Zenfolio launches BookMe, a comprehensive client management suite to automate bookings and payments, which can also be accessed through Zenfolio’s website builder solutions, Portfolio and PortfolioPlus. BookMe syncs with Google calendar to show the photographer’s availability in real-time. BookMe is the latest step in the modernizing Zenfolio’s original technology platform.

Promo.com & Getty Images. A sign of the times: Getty Images leads $16M investment in DIY video tool provider, Promo.com (née Slidely). Promo.com is also covered in our DIY Video Creation Apps report. Note that Getty recently also acquired Unsplash, a free photo stock platform, another sign that Getty is further diversifying from its roots as a high-end photo content licensing platform.

Snap. Biggest acquisition to date. Snap acquired AR startup WaveOptics for over $500M. The company, which represents Snap’s biggest acquisition to date, provides the waveguides and projectors used in Snap’s AR glasses, Spectacles. Who said that Spectacles are just a side project for Snap?

Pinterest. Pins going video. Pinterest is upgrading its Story Pins feature (and renaming it as Idea Pins) by centering Pins around the ability to share product or “how to” ideas though short-form videos, alongside other media, such as photos, music, text and stickers. Creators can edit their up to 60 second videos by adding their own voiceover or using a “ghost mode” transition tool to better showcase their before-and-afters by overlaying one part of a video on another. Like companies such as Snap, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram (for its Reels app), Pinterest also provides a fund to attract Creators. However, the $500K fund is only a fraction of what the other video-promoting platforms offer.

Poparazzi. Photo app bans selfies. No more “Look at this photo I took of what I’m doing.” The idea behind the new Poparazzi app: you propagate your friend’s social profile with your photos, and they do so with yours. You are your friends' “poparazzi,” and they are yours. You'll receive a notification when a friend adds a photo of you, while the app gives you control to remove this photo from your profile if you don't like it.

Reface. Face-swapping beyond selfies. Reface now lets users face-swap uploaded photos, or humanoid imagery (such as monuments, memes, or fine art portraits) inside photos, GIFs or videos. As of March 2021, Reface said it had 100M installs some 14 months since going live.