Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

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Case in point: recently, I've noticed that I'm getting more and more emails with the sign off "Warm regards." This is not a coincidence. It is an autosuggestion from Google. If you start signing off an email, it will automatically suggest "Warm regards." It just appears there -- probably an idea generated from an AI network. There are more and more of these algorithmic "suggestions" appearing every day, in more and more contexts. This is true for many text messaging programs: There are "common" replies suggested. How often do people just click on one of the suggested replies, as opposed to writing their own? These suggestions push us into conforming to the expectations of the algorithm, which then reinforces those expectations, creating a cycle of further pushing us into the language use patterns generated by software -- as opposed to idiosyncratic language created by a human mind.

In other words, people are already behaving like bots; and we're building more and more software to encourage such behavior.

Those suggestions appear in Google chat too and even if you don't click on them, the simple fact of reading the suggestion makes you much more likely to type it yourself. There's clearly a priming effect to it.

depends on your personality

On average, it doesn't. This is why advertising and magic work.

I'm a magician and a developer by training.

Now primarily employed in a marketing capacity.

Over my career I've worked with: - Doctors - Lawyers - Engineers - Fund managers - Academics (hard and soft sciences) - Mentalists/Hypnotists

All of them believed that they're specific training and temperament made them immune from simple persuasion techniques and that they were purely rational actors.

None of them struck me as any more rational/more independent thinkers than anyone else off the street

It is typical to rate yourself above your actual self.

Even when someone rates oneself down like when saying of themself that they're dumb, ugly or whatever, they generally mean it in a lesser fashion than for any other peer they'd attribute as such.

But its not above, its ascribung a mythical ability that does not exist - we don't talk about people who think they are psycic as optimistic, we call them crazy.

these guys are similar, except it's common belief.

nope, just being exposed to text influences you whether you want it or not

They're saying it might influence you to type something different. Some of us are just contrary.

Sometimes. Good luck keeping that up the majority of the time something tries to influence you.

Which is why it's important for folks to start applying AI to more interesting (but harder, more nuanced) problems. Instead of making it easier for people to write emails, or targeting ads, it should be used to help doctors, surgeons and scientists.

The problem is that these problems are less profitable. And that the companies with enough compute to train these types of models are concerned about getting more eyeballs, not making the world a better place.

The problem is not that those problems are less profitable. The problem is a combination of 1. Those problems are much harder 2. The potential harm from getting them wrong is much larger

Yup, I definitely agree that they're harder (and noted this). But I'm not sure I agree with your second point. Or rather, I think there's some nuance to it.

Sure, using AI to treat people without a human in the loop would clearly do harm. But using AI as an assistant, to help a doctor make the right diagnosis, seems like it'd do the opposite. It'd help doctors serve a larger patient population, make less mistakes, and probably equate to less harm in the long run.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that using AI for anything other than ad targeting is a net win.

Those suggestions are very few so I suspect they were hand-picked.

I don’t know if this is how it still works, but early attempts were modeled as classification problems with hundreds of hand picked completions. Can’t predict something really bad if it isn’t in your prediction list. This limits the surface of bad things to cases of tone mismatch like “sounds great” when talking about someone grieving a loss or something.

Doesn't GMail collect the data in some form of federated learning nowadays, like GBoard does? Federated learning does seem to be able to create the unintended positive feedback loop, converging on a single phrase and causing the users to lock themselves in a bubble.

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