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Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain
- jruohonen 3y agoSome good points from Raskin about the entangled relationship between the freedom of thought and the freedom of expression. But then regarding recommender systems and generative AI, I think he is saying pretty much what Lessig was saying earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999405
- glitchc 3y agoSo, I think this doesn't fly. Lessig is trying to extrapolate rules for a broadcast medium (magazines, newspapers, tv) onto a decentralized peer-to-peer medium, and it just doesn't work. If you have my IP and I have yours, we can share information without requiring an intermediate data broker. What Lessig is advocating for would make all ISPs, DNSes and backbone providers, the defacto gatekeepers of an essentially decentralized system. And even then, it won't stop me from sending you a packet over the local network, or establishing my own local internet.
- jruohonen 3y agoThe solutions are one thing, sure, but I was merely referring to this comment from Lessig: Q: "Just to be clear, this is the generative AIs, not the recommendation algorithm AIs." A: "I think they’re the same thing right now. They will be deployed hand in glove in order to achieve the objective of the person deploying them." Therefore, I am little skeptical also about Raskin's take that recommender systems would be "unsophisticated". If you look at TikTok, the contrary holds (even if his argument about misalignment is true).
- BlueTemplar 3y agoI am sometimes not certain when they are talking about "the internet", whether they actually mean the Internet, or US platforms (including US Tiktok). The suggested copyright-tracking US federal blockchain solution might work decently on the latter, but (thankfully) certainly not on the former.
- paulpauper 3y agoThe fake news problem is huge on twitter now, as if it could not get worse. I've seen people unashamedly post stuff that is literally false, not something false in a satirical or parody sense. It's becoming increasingly hard to separate fact form fiction. It will get to the point where in which the determination of truth is by some consensus process online in by competing fake or unreliable sources.
- stronglikedan 3y ago> The fake news problem is huge on twitter now Not really, considering the community notes generally call it out falsehoods very quickly. What a great system - Don't censor people, but do call them out for BS. Twitter is better than ever now, and people can finally get all the info to form their own opinions.
- rideontime 3y agoI liked it better when it was called BirdWatch. Glad Elon didn't trash it when he bought the place.
- anileated 3y agoTwitter community notes can be and are used to spread misinformation just like tweets themselves. It was only a matter of time until whoever wants to control the narrative learned how to influence the notes. Sometimes misleading notes are corrected, but in those cases they are just silently updated with no history preserved so there is no accountability. The one thing that could actually help identify bias (labeling tweets from accounts biased by association with, e.g., various governments, so that readers are aware and make their own judgements) Elon has killed almost immediately.
- paulpauper 3y agofake news can still on have an instant and severe impact, like on stock prices, before the correction . Community notes is still too slow.
- smokel 3y ago
- laurex 3y agoCoincidently I just listened to this talk yesterday by Nita Farahany and got some shivers. https://www.aspenideas.org/podcasts/who-can-track-and-hack-our-brains https://www.aspenideas.org/podcasts/who-can-track-and-hack-o...
- titzer 3y agoPlease remind me to throw myself in a volcano before that future comes.
- fumar 3y agoI would like to see podcast services provide transcripts by default. I rarely have time to listen but I would gladly read.
- hiatus 3y agoI ran the mp3 through a local whishper setup. Forgive the wall of text but chatgpt can make it more readable if you chunk it. https://pastebin.com/8tG3Fega https://pastebin.com/8tG3Fega
- deadbabe 3y agoI think this is an opportunity for traditional news networks to re-emerge as trusted news sources, by reporting only true and verified events. The days of going on social media looking for news are over, when people can quickly spin up fake articles with photos of some famous landmark on fire or in ruins it becomes too frustrating to discern between fact and fiction.
- thegrim33 3y agoTwo issues: 1) For many people, myself included, the mainstream media's reputation is so extremely damaged that anything short of a full, complete, tear down and from scratch rebuild of the entire industry won't in the slightest bit convince me to even give them a second chance. I've already moved on. 2) Even if a network literally posts only verifiable true facts, even if they have a panel of 1000 scientists and 1000 experts and 1000 people of different political persuasions that all agree with each other that the printed facts are "true", the organization can still easily lie and manipulate the population by simply selectively choosing which stories to cover and which to ignore, depending on which stories benefit their ideologies or hurt their rival ideologoies. Just "telling the truth" isn't remotely enough, they need to be both politically and ideologically neutral, they need to cover all events impartially and equally.
- topherclay 3y ago>they need to cover all events impartially and equally. A 100% accurate map of the territory is just the territory itself, and is useless as a map.
- unraveller 3y agoChanging anything would be admitting fault, and a self-professed authority never does that. Not when they can just latch on to other ways of virtue signalling as a kind of reputation repair substitute, much like what their advertising space does for other companies.
- unshavedyak 3y agoThe problem is they're _also_ guilty of spinning "fake news". Yea, it's far more subtle, but "people left" for a reason. I think there is opportunity here, but i don't think it's back to the old ways. I imagine it would be some hybrid. A news source which aggressively documents and details sources. All opinions backed by a paper trail, etcetc. I'd pay for that. Or something.. but i don't know what that looks like. These days it feels like everything has an agenda, and nothing (at least that i've seen) backs up claims/opinions/supposed-facts with the data fueling the statement.
- zzyzxxz 3y agoColonel : The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Rose : Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Colonel : Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims. Rose : Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. Colonel : "Be nice to other people." Rose : "But beat out the competition!" Colonel : "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed." Rose : But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... Colonel : You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Rose : Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. Colonel : The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Rose : Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." Colonel : And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
- __loam 3y agoSomething I don't see talked about often here is the nature of human feedback reinforcement learning and it's effect on models like GPT. I think a lot of people are under the impression that this makes the models lie less and say things that are more accurate. The actual effect is that we've built an AI model that was trained to give humans convincing output. This is, imo, incredibly dangerous to the health of the internet. AI has and is rapidly increasing the bullshit to signal ratio but it's doing it in a way that people aren't ready for, since it was literally optimized to lie convincingly.
- daxfohl 3y agoI don't get the spike in drama though. "Don't believe everything you read on the internet" was a common sense maxim long before AI came around. What is so different now? If anything, it just amplifies the maxim, which is arguably a good thing.
- ketchupdebugger 3y agoBefore only "dumb" people gets fallen into the trap. Its like getting scammed by a Nigerian "prince" scam. Now its much harder to tell apart fake and real. Pictures and videos can be AI generated so potentially you could be sold on an event that didn't happen. Or you can be convinced a real event was fake. It would be much easier to assume all footage of 9/11 was AI generated and fake because its unfathomable to think 2 planes actually flew into those buildings.
- __loam 3y agoYeah that's basically what I was going to respond with. AI makes the cost of believable bullshit near 0 for the user.
- daxfohl 3y agoIDK, put a TPM or something on cameras and media players display an "untrusted" watermark if the key doesn't match. Or something. I have a hard time believing we won't figure something out. But even if not: gullible people will be duped regardless, most people have some semblance of a BS detector they are able to fine tune based on the amount of BS in their environment, and the rest just believe what they want to believe irrespective of anything else. I don't think AI changes much of that calculus at all. I'm a lot more concerned about the future disparity between its math capabilities and its common sense; that a GPT will quietly break RSA without any awareness of the implications, and some unwitting person will prompt "what would happen if all the world's money was deposited in my account simultaneously" and GPT decides that there's only one way to know for sure.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoHere's the point I think keeps getting missed in these discussions: monopoly. Why are we worried about social media? Because it's a system made by and for a small number of companies. We worry about how well these companies will bear the responsibility that new technology creates for them. Why do they have that responsibility in the first place? Why doesn't that responsibility belong to you or me or any of the other ~5 billion individuals who participate in this system? Why can't we have a piece of that responsibility? The answer is monopoly. Our society got into this situation on purpose. It's in our laws, enshrined as a human right. The right to monopolize ideas. The right to intellectual property. It all started out as a way to game the system. People saw that free information was incompatible with capitalism, so they invented a game that would resolve the incentives. So long as enough people participated in this game, the edges of the system would balance out to humanity's benefit. Whether or not this game worked is a matter of perspective, but what is definitely clear is that the system that IP was originally designed to solve has fundamentally changed. Our ability to share ideas has grown exponentially. It costs practically nothing to share information today. Information can be shared by any person at any time any number of times to any number of people, and this can even be done anonymously. Participation in the game of IP has been an ever-growing problem, and no amount of threat or propaganda can keep it in line. --- Ideas are not the only thing that social media companies monopolize. The next presents an even greater responsibility: moderation. Social media moderation may be the most significant failure society has ever seen. The results of mismanaged moderation have fallen everywhere on the spectrum from petty argument to genocide. We all know that moderation is incredibly difficult, and nearly impossible to scale; yet we allow a handful of companies to manage it on their own! Billions of us participate in social media, and billions of us have zero leverage over what ideas and narratives we participate with. This system is fundamentally broken. The most perversely incentivized party (the company who wants to make money from participation) has monopolized the responsibility for the entire system! How could we ever expect them to get it right? We're over here worried about the tools they use to do the job - which is certainly its own problem - but why did we ever let them have the job in the first place? The tools are not the core problem. The core problem is at the center of this system: it's the fact that this system has a centralized core in the first place. We don't just need to liberate the exchange of ideas. We need to liberate the responsibility that comes with sharing them.
- avgcorrection 3y agoIt’s funny. I keep getting back to reading pieces like this.[1] Then we talk about how this is terrible. And it is. But apparently we’re all powerless to stop it. Because we’re gonna be complaining about the same thing next year. Why? Because it’s something that people do “freely”. (Like smoking cigarettes (except where are the nicotine patches?).) Do something about it? Well why don’t you take a three month leave from your job and do a digital detox? Anyone can do that. But wait, that’s too drastic. Just a weekend-long meditation retreat. But then you’re back to the scroll grind. Is there an opt-out button? Not symmetrically. You have all the options in the world if you want to scroll. But if you don’t want to scroll? Maybe Scrollers Anonymous? Become a semi-monk? Because we don’t really take this seriously as a community. We’re all individuals who are supposed to get our shit together. And learn that individually. Well, we can learn things from each others’ tiktoks and blog posts about getting over digital addiction or whatever it is that is our malaise. But that’s as far as that goes. But I’ll be here next year. Just scrolling. Falling for the same things again and again. [1] Not that I read this one.
- plutoh28 3y agoWe just can’t stop developing methods of hijacking our brains… it’s the holy grail of business. All we can do is try our best to recognize it, avoid it, and keep kids away from it.
- avgcorrection 3y agoAssuming that the holy grail of businesses is the holy grail of society—even above the welfare of your children.
- jprete 3y agoI've found it very effective to remove quick access to sites - bookmarks, browser navbar suggestions, etc. This is the last site I visit on a regular basis - I have a bunch of bookmarks of actually useful things here. I'll watch YT for maybe half an hour at a time, but I repeatedly tell it to never recommend channels that look like clickbait and I am actually feeling like YT is running out of content. I unfollowed everyone and everything on FB years ago and never visit anymore. When I started to deliberately avoid dopamine traps, the Internet got a lot less engrossing.