I think your post and this sort of article is a lot of hype and hysterical morality-panicking over nothing. Google has been using AI techniques to optimise ad

I think your post and this sort of article is a lot of hype and hysterical morality-panicking over nothing. Google has been using AI techniques to optimise ad targeting for 15 years now, certainly since around the time they floated (I used to work there so I know this for sure). These techniques were very successful. Nothing the algorithms did was based around weird psychological hacks, it was mostly to do with NOT showing people irrelevant junk that wasted their time and attention. You need AI at scale to stop these systems doing stuff like showing tampon ads to men, or video game ads to elderly women. But nobody sane would describe these outcomes as even remotely the same as "addiction", even though they increased click through rates a lot. To do so makes a mockery of people who suffer with actual addictions. This sort of article in the Guardian presents vague handwaving that sounds superficially intellectual without actually being so. The goal is to whip up hysteria to justify some crusade against tech companies, when the actual problem is not addiction but rather people who actually quite enjoy social media but perhaps feel a pressure or expectation that they should be doing something else.