As part of the company’s ongoing efforts to make its product more inclusive of the diversity of body types, Pinterest is currently testing a new consumer-facing feature that allows users to filter select searches by various body types. The function will make use of Pinterest’s recently unveiled body type technology, which will initially be compatible with suggestions for women’s clothing and wedding planning ideas.
This latter technology is the artificial intelligence behind this new front-end function. It is a revolutionary computer vision technique that uses shape, size, and form to detect distinct body types among the more than 5 billion photographs on Pinterest’s network. In an earlier announcement, Pinterest stated that the technology will make searches more inclusive and modify its algorithms. The company cited studies about the adverse effects of discrimination based on body size. According to Pinterest, this form of discrimination affected about 34 million people in the United States in 2019. This information comes from the Campaign for Size Freedom.
In addition, Megan D’Alessio, who formerly served as the manager of inclusion and diversity at Pinterest, mentioned that although body dissatisfaction is common among young people, it is far more frequent among women. She stated that “50% of adolescent girls are unhappy with their bodies compared to 31% of boys.”
Frances Haugen, a former employee of Meta who turned whistleblower, shared internal data that indicated Instagram had worsened body image issues for some teen girls. This issue has been at the center of debates over the potential dangers of using social media, which have emerged due to the release of documents by Frances Haugen, who shared the data. Additionally, the fact that Meta had been aware of this problem in addition to other harmful mental health concerns but had not taken any action to address them is the subject of a new lawsuit that the attorneys general of dozens of states in the United States have launched.
Pinterest created technologies to enhance the portrayal of diverse body types on its platform to be ahead of prospective restrictions regarding adolescents’ use of social media and its influence on issues related to body image. With the addition of the new body type technology to its suite of “inclusive AI” efforts, which have also included skin tone ranges and hair pattern search filters, Pinterest claims that it has improved the representation of different body types on the platform by a factor of five on women’s fashion-related searches in the United States.
The front-facing search tool for body type ranges is beginning to roll out to Pinterest users now. This feature allows users to search for ideas related to women’s fashion or weddings and then filter their results based on the person’s body type they are looking for. Not only does the firm hope that the feature will boost the variety of search results, but they also feel that it will increase interaction with the platform. According to Pinterest, when it introduced its skin tone range filter in the United States of America, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, the company noticed a seventy percent rise in the number of users who saved Pins from across the skin tone ranges in their feeds after the introduction of the filter.
When asked about the new feature, Sabrina Ellis, the chief product at Pinterest, stated, “We are committed to building a more positive internet, and with these developments, we hope to bring a more personalized and inclusive experience to Pinterest.” “We are still in the preliminary stages of testing, and we are looking forward to sharing additional developments and information shortly,” she said.
