alt Hacker NewsThis is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms:
- They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos.
- But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect.
- Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to surgically hit all the switches in the viewer's brain and turn it into a zombie hooked for days on end.
Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology.
Replies
We are doing to our brains and our children the same thing we are doing to pigs in cages, squezeeing every last cent until the planet burns down.
> Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology.
You'd do as well to hope that people wake up and stop opening the damned sites
I am surprised that no comment has yet mentioned Infinite Jest (which I'm still yet to complete - it's been years since I started).
Sounds like some people are trying to develop Snow Crash.
I think you're giving this a bit too much credence. And I think you also think there's something special about sorting videos by how often they're viewed in a recent timeframe (which is all you need to recreate evil social media algorithm)
Carfentanyl potentcy is roughly 10,000 times morphine. The pursuit of optimized technology usually far outpaces regulation or any kind of control. As technologies are controlled, even the lessened availability of more potent types causes an enormous overall issue. Humans are obsessive-compulsive optimizers, for good and for ill.
If you're relying on government regulation to solve this, I guess the obvious bigger question would be "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
there's not gonna be a regulation and even if there is, the damage would already be done. If you want to protect yourself, then best thing is to just delete the account and apps.
Stop calling them “social” media. They have not been that since algorithmic feeds driving infinite scroll replaced updates from your friends. That was more than a decade ago.
There is nothing at all social about the latest generation like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
Now apply it to porn
Don't forget it's not "the platforms" doing this, it's people like you and me, maybe even people reading this message. We, they, are building this, and don't care about anything as long the paycheck comes. This is the reality.
There's actual real people working on this bullshit. Horrifying doesn't even come close.
Social media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts.
We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time.
* I suppose the GPT-4o sycophancy/AI psychosis crisis was a preview, but that was just blunt “engagement” tuning.