[HN Gopher] It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms - ...
___________________________________________________________________
It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms - by law if
necessary
Author : rntn
Score : 138 points
Date : 2023-04-13 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| phailhaus wrote:
| Getting tired of this, because the algorithms themselves are
| worthless. Instead, demand websites that aren't just a
| recommendation feed. Demand the ability to categorize and rank
| content explicitly.
|
| The problem is that these websites are creating a feed, and then
| training themselves based on how you engage with...the feed. It's
| a toxic feedback loop, with almost no levers for you to interact
| with. If you get stuck in a rabbit hole, it is difficult to teach
| it how to get you out. That's independent of the "algorithm"
| being used, it's a problem with all of them.
| classified wrote:
| There is one lever left: Stay away from the toxic fast food.
| cush wrote:
| > ability to categorize and rank content
|
| Who has time for this? What about discovering interesting and
| new content amidst millions of options?
| ZainRiz wrote:
| No need to make every person categorize/rank their own
| content. But let them choose which of the 3rd party ranking
| algorithms they'd like to have serving them their feed today.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Not you personally, but users in general. See: Reddit. I
| never "accidentally" get into a conspiracy theory rabbit
| hole, that's something I can consciously join or unfollow.
| And because I have an explicit list of subreddits I'm a
| member of, the platform can much more accurately recommend me
| content when I'm in the mood to explore.
| ddingus wrote:
| I do. Tons of people do.
|
| As for new stuff, this is how I generally do it:
|
| Interact with friends and others near me. We trade all the
| time, recommend all the time. This is my long standing
| favorite.
|
| Community discussion. Here, for one. This is a strong second.
|
| Search, and now it may appear a GPT entity may well serve me
| up stuff I am going to like and need.
|
| See what "the feed" has in it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I certainly am not going to take the time to do that. But at
| the same time, I also completely ignore programmatic
| recommendations, because I find them terrible.
|
| What I do to discover interesting new stuff is to listen to
| the recommendations of friends, and to check out references
| or recommendations made from the stuff I already enjoy.
|
| Basically, I do what everyone used to do to find new music,
| but for all other media as well.
| baby_wipe wrote:
| Then all news outlets should be forced to publicize their
| internal editorial decisions.
| BeepBipBoop wrote:
| Isn't that just the news? As in what they publicize _is_ their
| internal editorial decision?
|
| Aside sticking a camera in the newsroom and livestreaming all
| day, what would this entail?
| Zak wrote:
| Here's one possible approach: you can have a secret algorithm
| OR platform immunity, but not both.
|
| News outlets don't have to publicize their internal editorial
| decisions, but they are responsible as publishers for the
| content they publish and can be sued if, for example they
| publish something false and defamatory.
| fifticon wrote:
| I would rather target consumer-hostile practices like youtube not
| letting users see downvotes, and the generally useless ratings
| and broken search in places like app stores. When something ends
| up with a 95% approval rating, it is almost guaranteed
| astroturfing.
| Tozen wrote:
| > ...a switch that turns the recommendation engine off.
|
| I do like that idea. If the company is not going to show what the
| recommendation algorithm is, then being legally forced to provide
| an option to turn it off seems fair.
|
| Too many companies pretend the "algorithm" is to blame for their
| shady practices, versus what its management and owners are
| directing it to accomplish.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I've always assumed the "Don't show me this channel" are
| processed in batch. They seem to work for me, but they also seem
| to take up to 24 hours to actually take effect.
|
| Likewise.. there are other users and creators on the platform.
| Creators often pick "deep dives" or "strange subreddits" as a
| topic. They show it to their audience, who then goes to search
| for some of this content on their own. Youtube sees the influx of
| interest in the topic and starts broadly recommending it.
|
| To many "privacy focused" types immediately start with a
| conspiratorial bent. Presuming that there's a nefarious purpose
| to these one off events, and then trying to tie them to Twitters
| recent release without any deeper investigation is some rather
| shoddy journalism.
| eimrine wrote:
| For me they use to work no more than 24 hours than Youtube
| forgots the setting. The most reliable way to really get rid of
| some kinds of content is to not watch it. Another way is to
| watch a lot of useful videos fully but maybe without sound,
| just to make Youtube think about me that I am fond of rocket
| science (otherwise it inevitable get to think that I'm fond of
| lowball things).
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes plus when you call a support desk, if the "person" on the
| phone is _not_ a real person, the first words said is "You are
| talking with an AI, not a person."
|
| I believe the only reason for Commercial Orgs are looking at
| ChatGPT is to eventually replace all support people with some
| kind of AI.
| patmcc wrote:
| I care a lot more about outcomes than whether the person I'm
| talking to is "real" or not. If my bill gets corrected by an AI
| but not a person? I'll take the AI.
|
| Think of the classic "is 0.002 cents the same as 0.002
| dollars?" call - https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ - I just
| tested, and chatGPT seems to understand the difference - so
| maybe this would be a case where the AI is better.
|
| edit: to be clear I'm fine with labeling if that's desired,
| it's the "I want to talk to a real person" that I think is
| silly (and oddly similar to the "I want to talk to an
| _American_ " that people also say).
| HWR_14 wrote:
| My guess is the AI will be less likely to correct your bill
| than a person.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I'm fine with labeling if that's desired, it's the "I want
| to talk to a real person" that I think is silly
|
| So anything that you don't value is silly?
| patmcc wrote:
| If someone said "I want to talk to an _American_ " or "a
| _woman_ " or "a _$race_ person " yah I'd consider that (at
| my absolute most charitable) "silly" in that context.
|
| I think there's a value/don't value axis but also a
| serious/silly axis. For food labelling as an example:
|
| Contains gluten. Don't value personally, serious.
|
| Contains GMO ingredients. Don't value personally, silly.
|
| edit: more specific to the support desk example - we could
| label each tier by "has the authority to do $X", I think
| that would be far more useful.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > If someone said "I want to talk to an American" or "a
| woman" or "a $race person"
|
| Well, sure. Or prejudiced, anyway, because none of those
| things affect how they perform their jobs. But whether or
| not the entity on the phone is a human absolutely affects
| how they perform their job. I would deal with a machine
| very differently than a human as a result.
|
| > we could label each tier by "has the authority to do
| $X", I think that would be far more useful.
|
| That would be useful as well, but the difference between
| human and machine isn't really about what authorities
| they have.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| How about, "I want to talk to someone whose first
| language is English"?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| If outcome is your goal, then why continue the overhead of
| inter-human dialogue?
| jebr224 wrote:
| You logic is sound ... maybe too sound. Have AI already taken
| over HK comments.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I'd rather they use the bot to correct the bill in the first
| place before they even send it to me.
| standardUser wrote:
| And most people don't care how many carbs are in a candy bar
| but we mandate labelling because it creates transparency and
| accountability and empowers the public. We should be doing
| the same with technology, only far more aggressively and
| comprehensively.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Until "Artificial Intelligence" actually exists, we should use
| a different word. I understand the distaste for "bot", but
| something like "system" or "computer" or "network" would be
| fine.
|
| We really need to stop personifying every project that has the
| _categorical goal_ of AI, but not the _result_.
| circuit10 wrote:
| The word AI has come to mean machine learning of any kind,
| which definitely exists. Maybe you're thinking of AGI
| (artificial general intelligence)?
| ted_dunning wrote:
| The word AI has always meant "the intelligent system that
| we would like to build".
|
| Historically, as soon as the system actually works for some
| task, it gets a new name. Thus expert systems, neural
| networks, logistic regression were all supposedly AI at one
| time and now are distinct. Already, we see a bit of a
| divergence in nomenclature where people distinguish large
| language models from other classes of techniques.
|
| Of course, up to now, it has mostly been techies who have
| used, abused and redefined the term. More recently,
| marketing types have adopted the work AI so it may lose all
| meaning soon.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Yes, but it's still misleading.
|
| As soon as someone says the words, "an AI", they have
| entered a narrative about the thing _personified_. The
| original subject is lost to an anthropomorphized facade.
|
| The adjective, "General" was originally meant as a
| classifier for _quality_ , not _category_. That distinction
| is still present on the face of the word itself. An AGI is
| an AI that can compete with human intelligence. Adding
| "General" to the phrase, "Artificial General Intelligence"
| does _nothing_ to define "Artificial" or "Intelligence".
|
| The distinction I just made is entirely based on symbolic
| meaning. Words are defined explicitly, and then put
| together. In this approach, the resulting meaning is
| independent of context: it's literal.
|
| Your distinction takes the opposite approach: an entire
| phrase - regardless of any symbolic definitions each word
| is known to have - is defined by the narrative it is
| surrounded with. In this approach, the resulting meaning is
| _dependent on_ the context: it 's literary.
|
| Large Language Models are famous for demonstrating the
| second approach: they _implicitly_ model whatever patterns
| exist in a prompt 's text, so that they can generate a
| "continuation" that follows those patterns, without ever
| needing a literal symbolic definition.
|
| This is exciting, because natural language - as the result
| of humans taking _both_ literal and literary approaches -
| is ambiguous. The literal approach that traditional
| programming language parsers use is fundamentally limited
| to "context-free grammars", because ambiguity can only be
| resolved with literary context.
|
| The problem is that LLMs cannot be literal. They are only
| capable of inference, so they lose all of the functionally
| that symbolic definition would provide.
|
| The distinction I made earlier has the same limitation that
| parsers have: it ignores the surrounding narrative context
| that has evolved away from the original meaning: it's
| short-sighted.
|
| The distinction you made has the same limitation that LLMs
| have: it ignores the original symbolic meaning that is
| still present in each word: it's confidently imprecise.
|
| What matters is the result:
|
| By ignoring the literary context, the definition of "AI" is
| written in stone, and we lose the ability to talk _around_
| it.
|
| By ignoring the literal meaning, we _imply_ "AI" tech is
| (by definition) capable of both literal and literary
| transformations.
|
| We can resolve both limitations by simply using new words.
| There is no need to say "AI" when "NLP" is more precise.
| circuit10 wrote:
| What does personification have to do with it? I never
| mentioned that. Are you falling into the "only people are
| intelligent" thing that I keep seeing? ChatGPT is clearly
| intelligent, just not as intelligent as a human
|
| I don't see a problem with the term AI, it's both
| artificial and intelligent
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Did you even read my comment?
| circuit10 wrote:
| I skimmed it, did I miss something?
| olyjohn wrote:
| AGI, you mean what we used to call... AI?
| brookst wrote:
| The AGI term came about to distinguish a certain level of
| capability, just alike ASI is appearing now.
|
| I don't see a problem with terminology getting more
| refined as a field matures. We used to have "cars" and
| "trucks." These days we have SUVs and sports cars and
| crossovers and who knows what else. Yes, they used to be
| "cars". People still find it useful to have more granular
| categories.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Yes, but in this case, the word is getting _less
| defined_. "AI" used to mean one thing, but now it
| doesn't, because "AGI" took its place. At no point,
| however, was this distinction made literal. It can only
| be found in the surrounding context.
| brookst wrote:
| I'd argue that "AI" used to mean a whole universe of
| things, from self-optimizing rice cookers to computers
| that figure out the meaning of life, the universe, and
| everything.
|
| Today AI remains a catch-all, but having more narrowly
| scoped terms like ML, AGI, and ASI lets people talk
| without tripping over whether or not the rice cooker is
| going to turn us all into paperclips.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > the first words said is
|
| you want to make the call even longer than necessary to provide
| me with information i can do nothing about. excellent.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I would find the information useful. It would allow me to
| adjust how I'm interacting with whatever is on the other end
| of the line.
| bko wrote:
| If talking to an ai is the cost of not being put on hold for 20
| min for the simplest request so be it. Honestly I welcome ai
| customer service. Most of the time it's just something super
| simple i want to do.
| toss1 wrote:
| "If" is doing a _LOT_ of work in that comment
|
| I have never seen nor heard of _any_ "ai" system for customer
| service that remotely approaches a barely competent human,
| and those are frustrating and annoying enough.
|
| ChatGPT4-level systems may be able to get much closer if they
| are provided the training set, and if they can, then great.
|
| BUT, the absolutely need to be able to figure out when they
| are at the limit of their knowledge/ability, and then hand-
| off to a human. ChatGPT4 has been spectacularly unable to do
| anything even close to this; and it actually just starts
| fabricating bullcrap in a highly confident voice.
|
| Corporate managers are already no good, horrible, awful,
| terrible at actually providing service, as it seems their
| only goal is to provide a cursory appearance of service and
| reduce their human costs. (Incidentally, this also massively
| misses the opportunity to gather excellent data on where
| their company could improve it's product/service and gain
| market share.) "AI" will only exacerbate the trend until
| several generations in the future when it is actually good
| enough, and it may become a competitive advantage to provide
| better service.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| > a barely competent human
|
| My problem hasn't been getting a barely competent human,
| it's been getting a barely competent human (or better) that
| also has the correct _authority_ for my situation.
| Unfortunately, in the case of both AI _or_ humans,
| unlocking the person that has both the correct competence
| and the correct level of authority to correct a problem is
| the hard part.
|
| If it was resolvable with the automated system, I already
| tried those steps. If it's not, there's often a _reason_
| (for the company, and not necessarily a good one) that it
| 's not. And that's where the authority part comes in; if
| the AI (or the call person) is doing the "figuring out" of
| the technical part of a problem but passes the authority on
| to someone without that knowledge, then how can the person
| with authority possibly provide authorization without first
| _lending their authority_ to the end-user support provider?
|
| Ultimately, the reason you can't do the things you need to
| do is because someone in management removed the authority
| of that end-user support provide to give it; that will
| still be true in the case of _competent_ AI, and you 'll
| probably have even less recourse since there is no person
| to advocate for you to the authority on your behalf.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| In a world where support people are often 10.5 or 11.5
| timezones away, how will we tell?
|
| Seriously. A couple of years ago I hit a truck tire tread and
| roached my radiator 30 miles east of Denver on I25. I have
| State Farm auto insurance, I probably pay more than I should.
| Their after hours support was terrible, as if they'd never
| heard of someone needing a tow on an interstate highway outside
| of city limits and street/number/zip code addressing.
| "Westbound I25, east of Denver at mile marker 316" is a good
| location, but I had to talk myself hoarse because the idea of
| "Interstate Highway 25" was incomprehensible. Several reps
| wanted a street address, which just wasn't possible.
|
| The towing company also basically held my car for ransom, I
| guess that's an experience an AI can't provide. Yet
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Well, the problem with an AI-based system here might well
| have been that I-25 goes north and south through the heart of
| Denver rather than east and west.
|
| The location "30 miles east of Denver on I-25" literally does
| not exist.
|
| Perhaps you meant I-70?
|
| And perhaps neither support humans far from Colorado nor an
| AI with a map would know to make that correct.
| jiwidi wrote:
| 99% algorithms are public already, its the usage and special
| tweaks made to those that make them unique at some companies.
| Lets say the white smoke release for twitter algo, its useless
| because everyone knows how to build a 4 stage recommender (see
| nvidia merlin open source repo) but the real juice is their
| weights to know what user embeddings does it learn.
|
| They cant release that since is personal user data.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > 99% algorithms are public already,
|
| What?
|
| You need to back up that statement, because I do not understand
| how it's at all true.
|
| Or do you somehow have access to Facebook's news feed
| algorithm, or the Youtube recommendation algorithm?
| amflare wrote:
| I believe the point GP was making was that the "algorithm" is
| not the important part, and is actually reasonably easy to
| reverse engineer if it's not just copied wholesale from an
| existing algorithm. The important part is the weights used in
| the algorithm. Since the weights are input, and usually semi-
| unique to the user, they would be considered private
| information.
|
| For example, I could tell you that the "sorting algorithm" I
| use to foo my bars is ksort[0]. But that's not really
| meaningful information without also knowing what the keys
| are.
|
| [0]: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ksort.php
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > I believe the point GP was making was that the
| "algorithm" is not the important part
|
| Not the _only_ important part.
|
| > Since the weights are input, and usually semi-unique to
| the user, they would be considered private information.
|
| Cool, then as an individual user, let me see that, too.
| hawksprite wrote:
| Maybe they mean 99% of known algorithms. Instead of 99%
| commercial visibility of a select few??
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| The fundamental math is almost always SVD (or related), some
| type of clustering, or some "fancier" minimization.
|
| These companies aren't inventing new math, they're just
| interpreting/biasing the results differently.
|
| For example, an ML algorithm wouldn't be the secret sauce.
| Most will result in the same answer. The _training data_ ,
| and its weights, are the secret sauce. Would this consider
| the training data as part of the algorithm? I would assume
| not.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I see you keep editing, so I'll respond to the latest
| version of your comment:
|
| Assuming an ML-based methodology (and I would not
| personally assume that), yes, the training data, the
| resultant weights, and the algorithm itself would be of
| interest, though at least the last two would be necessary.
| nomel wrote:
| Sorry, I reworded a bit. I didn't realize anyone would
| respond so quickly!
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| LOL, this is ridiculous.
|
| All computing is "fundamental math".
|
| That there are some known set of algorithms in the
| mathematical toolbox that are used is irrelevant.
|
| The question is, how are those tools put together, what are
| their inputs, and how are those inputs weighted.
| nomel wrote:
| algorithm: a process or set of rules to be followed in
| calculations or other problem-solving operations,
| especially by a computer.
|
| Is user data, that's used to train, part of the
| _process_? I don 't think so. It's an _input_ to the
| algorithm. In the case of ML, the input is the only thing
| that matters.
|
| Semantics, but I think it's incredibly important. It's
| the difference between posturing and actually affecting
| change.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Frankly, at this point you're just playing semantic
| games.
|
| The goal: To understand why the system is recommending
| what it's recommending.
|
| "Algorithm" is a short-hand for that goal.
|
| Everything else is just clever wordplay to try and
| deflect the conversation.
| nomel wrote:
| > "Algorithm" is a short-hand for that goal.
|
| I think it's the incorrect word. The "algorithm" requires
| a few pages of code. "Understanding why it's
| recommending" requires you get, and sift through,
| terabytes of user data from Youtube. They're _very_
| different.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| That's an interesting claim that's based on nothing but
| your own supposition.
|
| How about we get Youtube to show us their algorithm and
| associated weights (assuming an ML-based approach, which
| is a huge assumption on your part) and then we can find
| out if that's true.
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| why couldn't they be anonymized?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| A terrible idea that would make it trivial to game these
| algorithms.
| klik99 wrote:
| They are already being gamed, and with bad actors who have
| access to inside information. Not saying it's a good idea, but
| this isn't a valid reason
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| If some bad actors have access to inside information, that's
| a limited and solvable problem and doesn't mean that we
| should give up and give that information to everyone.
| brookst wrote:
| I've never understood the "an imperfect solution is no better
| than no solution and should be thrown out on principle" view.
|
| Door locks aren't perfect; our justice system isn't perfect;
| software isn't perfect. But they're all pretty useful and I
| just can't get behind a movement to abolish any of them
| because they fail to solve every individual case.
| lisasays wrote:
| OTOH - having them be open may ultimately lead to stable
| algorithms that can't be easily gamed.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| That's impossible. If you know exactly how some algorithm
| works, you'll always be able to game it.
| lisasays wrote:
| Not always. Think about the algorithms that casinos use.
| johnklos wrote:
| Add to that algorithms used to ascertain whether email will be
| treated as spam. I'm tired of explaining to people that Google
| and Outlook email are NOT deterministic, and that they could be
| missing email that might never even make it in to their spam
| folder, and they'd never know, nor would they ever know why.
|
| People say that spammers would just do the minimum they need to
| get spam delivered, but every person can have their own personal
| threshold for their own spam filters.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > People say that spammers would just do the minimum they need
| to get spam delivered, but every person can have their own
| personal threshold for their own spam filters.
|
| OK, so then rather then doing the minimum to get spam
| delivered, spammers would be more motivated to improve their
| spam to get above higher tresholds, so that people would have
| to set their tresholds higher and higher until all the
| legitimate mail they get is classified as spam.
| [deleted]
| johnklos wrote:
| That's not how it works, else that's what we'd already be
| seeing.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| We're not already seeing that because those algorithms are
| secret.
| johnklos wrote:
| That's a leap.
|
| You think that spammers are not knowing which spam is
| silently dropped is the one thing that's keeping them
| from leveling up? I strongly disagree.
|
| Even if that were the case, in my experience, silent
| failure negatively affects actual delivery much more than
| any positive effect it might have.
| akamaozu wrote:
| the publication recommends articles to read, but i don't see
| their algo for how the recommended articles were determined
| djha-skin wrote:
| Hard though, because the company often doesn't know _itself_ what
| its "algorithm" is. It is often spread over lots of different
| teams and departments, and may comprise hundreds of thousands of
| little design decisions made by people all over the company who
| are not talking to each other.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Oh wow what a wild ride of an article! As someone who has led the
| building of recommender systems (PM) for the last 5 years this
| rubs me the wrong way.
|
| > I defend myself from arbitrary data collection that fuels the
| algorithms using PiHole, the tracker-blocking Disconnect plugin,
| and Firefox, plus a few other tricks.
|
| The author clearly has no idea what he/she is talking about.
| Sure, Everything they mention blocks collecting tracking
| information but recommender systems mainly track your behaviour
| in the experience itself (clicks, page views, time on page).
|
| > That leaves me and other privacy conscious folk with just one
| lever to pull offer - disliking a video
|
| Again this author has it all wrong. If you're serious about
| privacy the last thing you want to be doing is providing more
| input into the models we create!
|
| And finally the comment that made me realise this author has no
| idea what he's talking about;
|
| > The solution to both issues is obvious, technically easy, and
| yet commercially a nearly impossible proposition: open up all
| recommendation algorithms. Make them completely transparent, and,
| for the individual being targeted by the recommendation engine,
| completely programmable.
|
| Are you joking? So he/she thinks the east answer if for every
| user to "program" their own algorithm. That's like saying every
| Tesla owner should be able to program their own car! Let's open
| the source code of Tesla to every owner!
|
| Idiotic article.
| mochomocha wrote:
| Also working in the field and I don't understand why this
| article is even on the front-page. The author has clearly no
| idea what they're talking about, it almost reads as a satire.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Oh good, I'm glad I'm not the only one then.
|
| I Have a feeling pooping on recommendations systems is en
| vogue right now. Social commentators love to point out how
| "evil" ML algorithms are while conversely complaining how X
| product is terrible at recommendations.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Speaking as someone _not_ in the field, that 's how it struck
| me as well.
| eftychis wrote:
| Three thoughts:
|
| a) I agree with you that the author lacks a basic
| understanding, and that they do not solve the problem.
|
| Yet: b) I think there actually might be a positive outcome for
| several reasons, including innovation, marketing and ethics, if
| one is to allow trained model to be queried arbitrarily. At
| least in the general case. (Think what is happening with stable
| diffusion and LLMs/LMMs.) Recommendation systems of say Youtube
| might be more useful to people making videos -- essentially
| somehow create a pre-query system before one finishes a video.
|
| c) As a couple others have noted, the Tesla example is not a
| good one. I understand it was formed in haste and I think we
| all can understand your reasoning. My thought though is:
|
| There is a) the right of repair -- yes still being fought for
| -- and b) the full self driving ability that might actually
| demand open sourcing code and models.
|
| How else do we envision the Courts and Congress to formulate
| liability and empower related LE, and rights groups
| investigations?
|
| Recall that the aviation industry achieved the "FSD" mode by
| building the infrastructure, extreme reliability (space and
| aviation started byzantine systems) and definitely not black
| box.
|
| P.S. As a personal note: I will never allow something to drive
| me, if I have _any_ liability, especially if it is a limited
| "black box" that I can not even arbitrarily query.
|
| Right now we are "cruising" along because liability is with the
| driver. Tesla and the auto industry will need to face that
| pill, if they ever achieve their goal. I think they will
| achieve it personally.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| I feel like "open the recommendation algorithms!" is easy to
| _say_, and it's less easy (and maybe impossible) to do
| effectively.
|
| Should we have access (by law) to the code that makes
| recommendations on content? That seems like a governmental
| overreach. If that was the case, then we should have to have
| direct access to the brain of every editor/layout person of
| every newspaper. Why was one story above the fold vs below the
| fold vs on page 4? I don't see a whole lot of distinction
| between those two.
|
| Once we get access to that, how do we keep people from abusing
| these algorithms on the supply side? Thought SEO sites were bad
| before? Guess what happens when those sites know what they're
| _actually targeting_, as opposed to blindly guessing!
|
| As a question, how well do you understand the recommender
| system that you've created? For a given piece of content, would
| you be able to guess at the penetration into the platform? As
| an outsider, I sometimes feel like the recommender systems I
| interact with have grown out of the platform holder's control
| (see: Nazi/ISIS/ISIL propaganda on YouTube, etc.). I think
| these are the points the article is reacting to.
|
| So if the article is saying "I would really rather not see
| Nazi/ISIS/ISIL propaganda," then, ok, that's good. That's a
| good want. But we're going to need an algorithm to determine
| what that propaganda _is_, and then downrank that for that
| user.
|
| So, is the conclusion of the article... misguided? Sure! Is the
| desire of the author valid?
|
| I don't know. I don't have time to read these articles.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| I hope the /s at the end of the last comment was loud enough
| to not be stated.
|
| But I read the article. Yeah, it was dumb. Specifically:
|
| > If recommendation algos aren't shared then we need - by
| legislation, if necessary - a switch that turns the
| recommendation engine off.
|
| This is... baffling. On YouTube - the case-in-point of the
| article - you already have access to a non-algorithmic feed
| of videos: namely, your Subscriptions feed.
|
| And if you don't want a recommendation algorithm, good luck
| finding new content that you like.
|
| And if you "turn off" the recommendation algorithm, you
| want... what, exactly? The latest videos uploaded to the
| platform? Still a recommendation algorithm. Videos with words
| in titles similar to the last video you watched? Still a
| recommendation algorithm. Videos that the creators of your
| favorite channel watched? STILL A RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM.
|
| I was wrong. The desire of the author is far dumber than I
| originally gave credit for.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I don't see the problem with someone not wanting
| recommendations on their front page, having a chronological
| feed somewhere else is nice but it's not the same thing.
| Videos that get popular, and are therefore recommended, are
| those that prey on the basest components of our human
| nature (even if you curate your feed as best as possible),
| I don't see why we should put up with it.
|
| Your list of recommendation algorithms is inaccurate, a
| chronological feed is not a recommendation algorithm in any
| sense of the term, as for the rest you can't compare the
| deeply complicated and often abusive recommendation
| algorithms that are deployed on social media to the simple
| heuristics you listed.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| > ... I don't see why we should put up with it.
|
| I mean, you don't have to. Don't want to see YouTube's
| algorithmic feed? That's cool - just HTTP 3xx your
| youtube.com to the subscriptions page. There are some
| good browser addons to do just that[1][2].
|
| Granted, that doesn't remove the recommendation algorithm
| from your YouTube experience. You would have to use some
| kind of content blocker to remove the algorithmic feeds
| from the video pages. I find that uBlockOrigin works well
| for that.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/redirector/
|
| [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/
| ocgpenf...
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| The distinction is easy to make, a recommendation algorithm
| is personal, automated, scalable to a gigantic amount of
| content, entirely opaque for the average user.
|
| The social implications are much more dangerous than a
| newspaper editor and journalist following their paper's
| political bias.
| walleeee wrote:
| > That's like saying every Tesla owner should be able to
| program their own car! Let's open the source code of Tesla to
| every owner!
|
| Other critiques aside, these things are not very similar. You
| can't run someone over with a buggy recommender system. You
| bork your own newsfeed, who cares?
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Ok fair enough, I formed that analogy in haste.
|
| My point was that it's not easy at all to "open up" an
| machine learning model for a user to "program". It's complex
| enough for an ML engineer to develop!
|
| In theory, maybe it is possible but it would be incredibly
| expensive to produce such a system, let alone maintain. But
| even then, the ability to control an Ml system is such a
| niche ask that it would never happen
| paxys wrote:
| Why stop at recommendation algorithms? All code and internal
| documentation for every product should be posted publicly. Every
| single email and discussion board at every company should be
| open. Will people be happy then?
| blueprint wrote:
| yes
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Well yeah. Good riddance to IP
| BeepBipBoop wrote:
| [dead]
| efficax wrote:
| the algorithms that use ML are useless without the weights.
| What's the point?
| rektide wrote:
| As we've already seen from twitter releasing the algorithm: it's
| useless & irrelevant without the weights.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I totally disagree.
|
| For example, Twitter releasing the algorithm showed us that
| certain specific people were getting artificially boosted.
|
| We also saw that the topic of the war in Ukraine was getting
| special treatment.
|
| Yes, we all _guessed_ that was happening, but without the code
| it was just supposition that Twitter could deny.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Twitter releasing the algorithm showed us that certain
| specific people were getting artificially boosted.
|
| It did? Did I miss something here? I don't remember seeing
| that. There was certainly code that tallied certain specific
| people and topics, but I don't see an indication of what was
| done with that tally.
| klyrs wrote:
| Release the weights too?
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| in real-time :)
| Buttons840 wrote:
| We can't _run_ the algorithm without the weights, be we can
| understand it -- or rather, we can understand it as much as it
| 's possible for anyone to understand it. Having the weights
| will not add understanding. Having the loss function used
| during training will.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Then the weights should be considered a functional part of the
| algorithm.
| sidfthec wrote:
| The weights aren't going to help understand "why we see what
| we see", which is what non-tech people (and this article)
| think they'll get from companies releasing "the algorithm"
| esafak wrote:
| Worse, people game the algorithm, making it useless.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Most importantly, it should be required by law how Spotify
| recommends new songs. They cannot operate in darkness forever.
|
| /s
| honksillet wrote:
| Shadow banning should be illegal and all banning or throttling
| decisions should be explained publicly in real-time.
| ashes-of-sol wrote:
| Sure, if you want to make it dead simple for bad actors to be
| able to get around safety measures.
|
| This is a complete non-starter from a user safety standpoint.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| At first, I thought this was laughable, because SEO bottom
| feeders would immediately game everything. But after
| contemplation, I think that would work out. The SEO stuff would
| be immediately obvious, because it would be all tricks, it
| wouldn't have a thin veneer of BS "content" like it does today.
| Human could detect SEO spam instantly.
| ehnto wrote:
| I think AI spam will be the nail in the coffin for standard
| search engines. What will be interesting is how SEO might start
| targeting AI source collection.
|
| I imagine being a source for a question like "What are the best
| speakers to buy for $100?" would be quite valuable.
| tedunangst wrote:
| So how many times will I have click next page to get past the
| spam in search results?
| esafak wrote:
| So the solution is to get humans involved? Yay, I've got
| nothing better than to eat spam.
| whitemary wrote:
| Open source them, along with ML algorithms and model weights.
| Anything less is effectively meaningless, and if you insist that
| doing so is a privacy risk then your product is unfit for
| society.
| 23throw23 wrote:
| [flagged]
| clircle wrote:
| Seems like over-reach when the solution is to just subscribe to
| youtube channels in RSS so you can sort the content in any way
| you please.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| Why stop there?
|
| What's next?
| rcoveson wrote:
| Yeah, this seems like a slippery slope towards requiring
| companies to release all source code under all circumstances.
|
| I'll get my downhill skis!
| gspencley wrote:
| While I'm not in favour of legislating something like that,
| because I think it would be extreme government overreach, if
| that were to just happen magically I would be hard pressed to
| find the problem.
| mindslight wrote:
| Better yet, use straightforward antitrust to go after the
| _bundling_ of content hosting with software to display the
| content. Using "third party" independent clients to display user
| content from Youtube, Twitter, etc should be a widespread
| practice, at which point those independent clients can present
| the service's recommendations (while controlling exactly what
| data points are input to them), and/or create/display their own
| recommendations entirely.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| It isn't the recommendation algorithms themselves which are
| insidious, it is that they are coupled directly with a single
| human. They are like mental parasites which watch every single
| interaction one makes and adjusts, ever so slightly, to the
| negative just to keep you watching.
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