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Comment by gofreddygo | Hacker News Reader

> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data

You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't.

In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many of these are paid promotions? I don't know.

and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow on the negative side of alcohol consumption.

I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything else.

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Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal that is „hollywood“ sold everyone out for their gold calf tobacco money

But a drunkard might sit behind the wheel, at which point it becomes detrimental to everyone on the road…

And there are countless books and movies where the hero has drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.

Driving itself kills more people in the us every month than 9/11, yet has been glamourised for a century

It's just that bad drivers are abundant in the US, and driving is way underregulated for such a car-centric country.

Right? A woman comes home and immediately pours herself a large glass of red wine, without even washing hands or changing into home clothes. WHO DOES THAT? Pure product placement.

I think that your negative view of alcohol is making you a bit conspiratorial. It's an extremely deeply ingrained thing in western culture, you don't need to resort to product placement to explain why filmmakers depict it. People genuinely do have a good time drinking.

> People genuinely do have a good time drinking.

This depends a lot on the person. I, for example, would much more associate "reading scientific textbooks/papers" with having a good time. :-D

Sure, I was using a generic sentence [1] not universal quantification!

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generics/

It's that way because of successful marketing - just like smoking, or cars, or fast food.

Beer, spirits etc was a big thing way before the printing press.

People enjoyed drinking long before there was marketing. People have been enjoying alcohol for literally tens of thousands of years. It has been associated with celebrations for many thousands (e.g. Jesus giving people alcohol to keep a wedding reception going - and that is just something that comes to mind - I am sure there are MUCH earlier examples someone familiar with older stuff can come up with).

I would correct it to anti-alcohol sentiment being ingrained in American culture (as it is in some others, such as the Middle East) rather than western culture. Its an American hang-up, as with nudity etc.

Alcoholism was so rampant in the US that enough states ratified a constitutional amendment making it illegal.

It wasn't enough to kill alcohol consumption entirely, but it did cut back on the culture of overindulgence as measure by death rates before and the years after.

Other countries also banned alcohol in this time period, and new Zealand voted for it twice but never enacted the ban.

Not to excess though?

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