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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Did your friend ever produce any evidence for this?

No, friend wasn't able to show me evidence because of a reason equivalent to an NDA. I have no reason to distrust my friend. I'm confident what he's informing me is possible as well.

FWIW, informing you that the system exists is probably already a breach of NDA. If they failed to produce any evidence or conclusive examples of this happening, it's likely they were running one over on you. "Dead internet theory" has been a 4chan-staple since the mid-2000s, and it's more-or-less the same idea - "when people don't engage with my problematic content, it must be the fault of AI!" Needless to say, this is pretty easy to prove wrong and mostly just reflects conspiratorial loneliness. It might be true that your friend is trustworthy, but their theory holds little water and sounds more like a gross misunderstanding than systemic abuse.

But hey, maybe he's right. I don't know (or really care) what our next steps are as a society if it's true, but assuming he's telling the truth seems a bit like jumping-the-gun.

We grew up together and he's a programmer similar to me. I have been following AI for other aspects that make me believe what he explained is realistic. Also I did ask him for his thoughts on the ethics of it and he thinks the outcome is fine. I'm curious what your thoughts are concerning ethics if it's indeed happening.

It's perfectly fine, from a legal standpoint. My personal opinion regarding the ethics of the situation is mainly a reflection of that - in the bizarro world where social media companies need to synthesize content to drive wholesome engagement, it's entirely their right to do so. When you sign up for any of these services, you acknowledge that your uploaded content and online experience is completely subject to their will.

The ethics of all this have already blown over. Twitter and Facebook have both been proven to shadowban controversial figures, and no ethical panic ensued. People don't care, they want a Tik-Tok style feed of sugar water and sweet dreams fed to them on an IV drip. If the next step is fabricating fake content (again, considering how many real content creators exist this seems unlikely), then there is no ethical discussion. It's as fake as the AI-corrected profile-picture you shot on iPhone. It's as real as your approximate location being tracked by Walmart WiFi and then processed into shopping habit data to sell to competitors. If you use Facebook or Twitter (or arguably any social media) then you're already being manipulated. They don't need to promote fake content to make you think what they want.

1) We know that corporate America is experimenting with AI to perform business functions more efficiently.

2) We know that shadowbanning exists and is used to contain spammers and other users that a platform doesn't want on their site.

Given that the previous two facts are true, it seems like a perfectly logical outcome that somebody would decide to experiment with some kind of AI powered chatbots to keep shadowbanned users better contained.

That, or Occam's Razor could suggest that the shadowbanned second-class is a much less interesting/engaging group of individuals than the rest. That aligns with the theory that this is all for money (it is) and it's much easier to imagine than a cross-platform initiative to use GPT-3 for pestering extremists.

Who knows though, I'm willing to entertain anything here in the grand ol' USA. Still, logic suggests that there's a simpler answer here.

It's the opposite of pestering extremists, it's keeping extremists entertained while keeping them from pestering others. Seems like an excellent way to deal with people who avoid bans, the problem of course lies in who gets to decide what gets you thrown into the ai segregation boxes...

> Seems like an excellent way to deal with people who avoid bans

I'm sure this would be reasonably effective on the specific goal of occupying these users' time for days/weeks/months/or even years until they realized that they were talking with robots, but it seems like it might have significant negative social consequences for some groups.

For instance, imagine somebody dealing with depression who genuinely needs a human to talk to. Like many in modern society, maybe social media is the only human interaction they have until they get shadowbanned based on tenuous reasons. God, what happens then when depressed and/or unstable people only have robots to talk to for years? What happens when they realize that they've been tricked and feel intense anger/sadness/hopelessness?

This is playing with peoples' lives with fire and shouldn't be an acceptable practice.

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