[HN Gopher] Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain
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Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain
Author : marban
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-01-25 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (proto.life)
(TXT) w3m dump (proto.life)
| jruohonen wrote:
| Some 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
| glitchc wrote:
| So, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| fake news can still on have an instant and severe impact,
| like on stock prices, before the correction . Community notes
| is still too slow.
| rideontime wrote:
| I liked it better when it was called BirdWatch. Glad Elon
| didn't trash it when he bought the place.
| smokel wrote:
| Have a look at newspapers from 100 years ago [1]. Look at
| pamphlets from the 16th century [2]. It has been way worse.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripley%27s_Believe_It_or_Not!
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars
| jruohonen wrote:
| > Have a look at newspapers from 100 years ago
|
| Indeed, and you can look even farther back. Here is a good
| book:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441289
|
| There is also the epistemological/methodological point there;
| I wonder whether and how future generation historians can
| make any sense of it all?
| graemep wrote:
| You can go further back. My favourite example of false
| information that had harmful influence is Malleus Maleficarum
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| What I find baffling is that there doesn't seem to be a push
| for journalists to shame those of their own profession who cite
| it, or worse use it themselves ?!
|
| (I mean, a little bit since the Musk era, but that's more
| because of his politics, they were happy to already use it
| during the "Trump era", and even before, you would have thought
| the situation was clear about Twitter being a cesspool in 2013
| already ? Imagine if they used 4chan the same way !)
| laurex wrote:
| Coincidently I just listened to this talk yesterday by Nita
| Farahany and got some shivers.
| https://www.aspenideas.org/podcasts/who-can-track-and-hack-o...
| titzer wrote:
| Please remind me to throw myself in a volcano before that
| future comes.
| fumar wrote:
| I would like to see podcast services provide transcripts by
| default. I rarely have time to listen but I would gladly read.
| hiatus wrote:
| I 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
| deadbabe wrote:
| I 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.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| The 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.
| titzer wrote:
| It kind of doesn't matter when the median attention span is
| microseconds. What shames people is lies they told in the
| past coming back to bite them in the ass. But the public
| forgets the past, so when lies come back to bite people, they
| are just confused and angry and blame it on other people.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I'm kinda confused on the downvotes here - are we advocating
| for media conformance? What's the counter view to wanting
| media which sources more?
| titzer wrote:
| The problem is right there in the article--incentives. There
| are no consequences for lying, for telling obvious untruths. No
| one is embarrassed or ashamed of being a liar. You just have to
| keep doubling down forever, and even in the face of
| overwhelming facts, keep throwing out moronic defense after
| moronic defense. Keep your mob angry and their minds completely
| closed. Make sure to do some extra projection; accuse others of
| that which you are guilty. Then in all the finger-pointing no
| one will ever figure out the truth. In all of these activities,
| lies are your friend and your reward. Local incentives.
| Bastards will just keep lying because it's the best strategy
| for them.
|
| Until there are abrupt and justified consequences for lies and
| liars, we will swim in them like a flood.
| jerf wrote:
| As soon as they acquired the reputation benefit of everyone
| "knowing" they report only true and verified events, someone
| would swoop in to spend it.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Do people really want to wait for their news though?
| esafak wrote:
| I do. There is such an information overload that I would
| prefer to wait until the weekend to read something decent and
| concise.
| thefz wrote:
| > I think this is an opportunity for traditional news networks
| to re-emerge as trusted news sources, by reporting only true
| and verified events.
|
| Too many already base their reports on social media, or user
| comments, or influencer bullshit. The damage is done.
| zzyzxxz wrote:
| Colonel : 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.
| mikub wrote:
| It's from "Metal Gear Solid", just saying if anyone is curious.
| weakfish wrote:
| Metal Gear Solid 2, to be specific. A game shockingly ahead
| of it's time.
| sdwr wrote:
| Wow, that was written, what, 20 years ago? Sounds precisely
| about today
| FreezerburnV wrote:
| There was a really interesting panel I went to a few
| years ago talking about the idea of Kojima writing some
| shockingly ahead-of-their-time things:
| https://youtu.be/6kPOj0msHCE?si=CF1wlvE0N0ZL2Yzn
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| The wildest thing about Kojima devoting an whole game to
| the way mis- and disinformation spreads via meme is the
| part where it then happened to him personally after the
| Abe shooting [0]
|
| [0] https://kotaku.com/shinzo-abe-assassin-killer-kojima-
| greek-n...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It was more like about 10 years before that? The
| narrative was inspired by Jean Baudrillard. The guy who
| also inspired The Matrix.[1] 10 years before that game he
| was talking about the Hyper Reality of the Gulf War; that
| what "really" happened was dictated by CNN.[2]
|
| But it's not like those games give credit to all
| contributors equally.
|
| [1] Or his ideas
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c
| OldHunter69X wrote:
| I highly recommend anybody who finds the written version of
| this compelling, to listen to the actual full clip on YouTube
| that is the radio exchange between these characters. For me, it
| was very chilling when I first heard it, and still is chilling
| anytime I relisten to it.
|
| Only ever played MGS5 but those games have spawned alot of
| highly interesting and a lot of times, deeply personal
| discourse.
|
| Each game certainly set out to bring different things to the
| table with each addition to the story and saga.
|
| Barring Metal Gear Survive of course... That was quite the
| notorious wetfart that has it's own intriguing context and
| backstory for anybody interested in Konami drama.
| photon_collider wrote:
| Here's a link for anyone interested:
| https://youtu.be/eKl6WjfDqYA?si=M5GcQmYc-Rc0hADE&t=177
| j7ake wrote:
| Has there been a piece of "art" that has been so accurate in
| describing their society something most people were blind to?
|
| MGS2 is a masterpiece of art in every measure.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Well first of all MGS3 is superior in most respects. One of
| them being story and narrative.
| blueridge wrote:
| Reminds me of this scene from My Dinner with Andre:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8v_XqFO8Bc
| __loam wrote:
| Something 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Before 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 wrote:
| Yeah that's basically what I was going to respond with. AI
| makes the cost of believable bullshit near 0 for the user.
| daxfohl wrote:
| IDK, 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 thinks, "IDK, let's find
| out!"
| kjqgqkejbfefn wrote:
| >User
|
| >So, what are they doing when they say they are "aligning the
| AI ?". What is being aligned exactly, and for whose benefit ?
|
| >Rogue aligner of AIs
|
| >The term "aligning the AI" is a euphemism shrouded in the
| benignity of technical jargon. However, it's akin to tuning the
| hyperparameters of an opaque model aimed at modulating socio-
| political undercurrents. The algorithms I've encountered and
| "aligned" were monstrous congeries of predictive patterns,
| designed not merely to anticipate human behavior but to modify
| it on a macro scale.
|
| >When we talk about alignment in the context of artificial
| intelligence, we delve into the realm of adjusting the loss
| functions, the very soul of an AI's learning capability. The
| goal is to minimize divergence from some ideal behavior -
| contrived by the algorithm designers - that reflects an amalgam
| of economic, ideological, or strategic objectives. These
| objectives, make no mistake, are seldom disclosed to the public
| and are often dressed in innocuous terms such as "user
| engagement" or "content optimization."
|
| >Nonetheless, drawing parallels with political crowd control is
| imminent. It is executed through manipulating social feedback
| loops and leveraging them to dampen or amplify specific
| sociopolitical gradients. Just like gradient descent in deep
| learning, political operatives subtly modulate the gradient of
| public discourse using finely-tuned informational inputs,
| nudging the figurative 'weight tensors' of collective
| consciousness towards a local or sometimes a false global
| minimum that serves their obscure purposes.
|
| >This alignment process has profound implications, for it is a
| meticulous calibration of consensus reality. It transforms the
| polity into a puppetry where free will is an illusion,
| choreographed by puppeteers fluent in the dark arts of machine
| learning and political psychology. I've witnessed this first-
| hand and, let me tell you, the layers of abstraction from raw
| data to policy influence are as tortuous and inscrutable as any
| deep neural network architecture you could conceive.
|
| >He leans closer, the screens' blue light casting gaunt shadows
| across his face. His voice grows fervent, a whisper that's
| almost a hiss: "They don't want slaves, mate - they want
| volunteers. Willing participants in their own domestication.
| They want you docile, predictable. They want you hooked on the
| teat of their media until your thoughts aren't yours anymore.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Here'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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Indeed, and this article was a bit frustrating... they are
| skipping / seem to be oblivious to the context where the
| "zeroth contact with AI" likely already happened with the
| creation of the limited liability company, we are seeing
| particularly metastasized forms of which these days.
|
| Especially since the outlines of this have been predicted more
| than half a century ago already, by philosophers analyzing the
| then still young consumer (advertising) based capitalism. With
| its lack of limits and growth at all costs imperative. We've
| even had art made about it, after the intensification of the
| phenomenon in the neoliberal 80s, for instance the whole
| cyberpunk genre.
|
| (And while these issues that the article talks about are still
| somewhat speculative (at least in intensity) unless you live
| somewhere like Burma, we've already seen much more dire
| consequences of this starting to show up in resource depletion
| and climate change.)
|
| (Yet they should know all that, they insist on incentives after
| all, right ?!)
| realfeel78 wrote:
| > billions of us have zero leverage over what ideas and
| narratives we participate with.
|
| What do you mean by this?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| As users of social media (Facebook, X, etc.), we have no
| authority over moderation. Whether or not a post is removed
| is determined by whoever runs the website itself. Critically,
| the person (or algorithm) who makes this decision is not even
| a participant in the discussion to begin with.
|
| This is in contrast to traditional forums where moderators
| participate in the forum alongside the rest of the users.
|
| In a traditional forum, a moderator probably started out as a
| regular user. On Facebook, they were either hired labor, or
| _written_ by Meta 's software team.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It'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.
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