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vrganj • yesterday at 6:10 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Let me ask you this directly, I'd love to hear your takes as somebody working in ad targeting: Don't you think what you're building is kinda... creepy?

My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.

But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?

Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!


Replies

dualvariable • yesterday at 7:14 PM

Advertisement and propaganda are two different arms of the same mechanism/technology stack.

And they have been for a very long time, dating back to at least when von Braun was building those V2s.

If we lived in a more humane world, intrusive advertisement and propaganda would all be banned--but that is like talking about some kind of utopia-level civilization right now. Might as well be discussing modern democracy back in the 10th century.

karlitooo • today at 2:37 AM

As someone who has worked in ads, this is scifi. Nobody is building mind control into BLACK HOLIDAY SALE ads. If that were true I could get you to buy long haul truck gearboxes or donate to save the slime mold foundation.

People buy to solve the problems they already had. All ads do is give them a timely reminder of something they were already thinking about.

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