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Comment by vvarren | Hacker News Reader

I’ve noticed that my own Instagram feed was only showing me content from large accounts and female friends who posted bikini pics. And if I decided to keep scrolling without liking a picture it would continue showing me the same post on subsequent logins or even the second photo in the album of the post further down in the feed. The app was essentially telling me what posts to like while filtering out all the genuine content my friends were posting. So I deleted it. We need a good ole consumer boycott and government-initiated privacy probe.

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"advanced artificial intelligence" > looks under covers > SEXSELLS.exe, commited 18y ago, zuck

I remember watching a YouTube video from The Wall Street Journal where they had configured 100 bot accounts to essentially crawl TikTok to study how it develops profiles for each user. For most users it may seem rather innocent, but in the video the user was modeled to be someone struggling with depression and towards the end of the simulation was being fed mostly depressing content.

I think recommendation engines can be useful for discovering content, but using gradient descent to do this can also be extremely dangerous. There is seemingly no control for when the recommended content is slowly pushing someone towards self-harm or other acts of violence.

Generally they optimize for engagement not informing you of your friends activities.

So it had likely pigeon holed you into a class (age, sex, relationship status, whatever sites the facebook button has said you were on) and it is showing you things that "similar" people have engaged with and lets be honest a good amount of the popular posts on social media are thirst traps...

I know you can download the information from Facebook about the profile it keeps on you but I am not sure you can do the same for Instagram. Regardless it was pretty interesting seeing what it had in there. For me some of it was correct and some was wildly off.

This sounds rather troubling on multiple levels, and perhaps an anti-pattern of sorts.

If we replaced the bikini photos with gratuitous ads, would that be more of what we'd expect typically?

This raises a really interesting question. It’s quite possible that an algorithm tuned to predict which post most users will engage with learns to boost posts of people in bikinis without being explicitly programmed to do so.

So in this case who exactly is to blame ?

Well, Instagram built the algorithm and keeps it in place, so I think they still deserve the blame.

Your argument is similar to one person saying “stop showing me pictures of that,” and the response being “we can’t be held responsible for showing you this over and over, we can’t help ourselves, you have to forgive us, but it’s your fault I keep showing you this. Our spies say it affects you, so that makes it your fault”

No what I’m asking is suppose you want to show people what they are likely to be interested in then how do you avoid this problem ?

Yeah this is what’s most sad about tiktok to me. It’s a great new format for media, but it allows, or is especially susceptible to, attractive people putting their goods on display and teasing their viewers. Some days it feels like tiktok promotes and validates this behavior, and other days it feels like the technology just scales up high school popularity dynamics and isn't really anything new. So does the tech drive the algorithm or do the users?

Youtube doesn't particularly have this type of problem, for example. It has others, sure, but the core content it breeds is not shorts of high schoolers in their bedroom dancing in their underwear. Snapchat and sending that content privately was one thing but now tiktok validates that behavior with a public audience. And then onlyfans exists to graduate your content and monetize your body directly. I’m pretty sex-positive so it’s not that I’m turned off by the concept of people wielding sexual power in society or making money off their body. But I’m not sure what society looks like when that’s the highlighted path for 16 year old girls to replicate in order to make life changing money or be immensely popular as their own brand in their 20s.

Back to the youtube example: on youtube it seems the content is important because you have to engage for more than 30s whereas on tiktok it feels like you’re following personal brands and the utility of the content is almost irrelevant.

YouTube also has this problem whereby it suggests extremist content and blatant misinformation.

If I shoot a man, I am to blame.

If I build a robot that shoots a man when I press a button - and I press the button - then I am still to blame.

If I build a robot that runs a bunch of algorithmic code and it shoots a man - I am still to blame.

So the orginator of the algorithm (Facebook) is to blame, in full and without reprieve. The algorithm did not exercise free will.

Had Facebook made it so that the algorithm was transparent, or at least easily disabled then they might have some defense. They did not do this.

In this case though the algorithm is an "AI" which is short for "complex algorithm that's too obtuse for anyone to really understand".

Obviously, if you build a killer robot, it's totally okay as long as you have no idea how it works.

This is slightly out of my league but is there not a human, or many humans, that write the algorithm? Is this so out of control that you can't make changes?

I guess it sort of depends on what you mean by the algorithm. I'm not an expert on this either, but the general idea is that you pick some sort of thing you want to promote (e.g. engagement), and then you use a really large data set with thousands of parameters to construct the `parameters -> engagement function`, some of those parameters will be user supplied, and some will be Facebook settings.

The thing that's opaque is this function that the program produces. You can really only know how the function works experimentally.

If you build a robot to help people and program that robot to do what its owner says and the owner tells it to shoot people, who's to blame? And if it's you for programming it, is it not then the gun manufacturer to blame when a user of a gun shoots someone? the car manufacturer to blame when the user of a car hits and kills someone?

I think this form of counter works if and only if users explicitly direct the algorithm.

If you buy a handgun, and sometimes that handgun goes off without the trigger being pulled due to faulty design, then that's the one time the handgun manufacturer is actually liable.

It's not as if you get to tell the algorithm "Hey, I want Facebook to be a positive experience" or opt in to content.

When you have an interest like religion or politics and the algorithm starts showing you anti-vaxx material, that isn't the user in control. It is more like that faulty firearm.

Has any large organization stated on the record for their algorithms what the normal mode of operation looks like and what a failure looks like?

For a handgun both factors are widely understood in the majority of the adult population.

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