I am admittedly a YouTube "creator," but I am also a part-time user.
I wish that I could adapt my own watching algorithm. I hate being shown advertisements for a mixture of crap and amazingly good content. Because it’s never a mixture of good with a little bit of bad; it’s straight up "WTF is this?!?" content.
I follow a chosen list of accounts on my non-social media account. Yet all the recommended video ads I get…
Dude. "Recommended for You" is looking super grim. Mostly NOTHING that I want to see.
And it’s like, YouTube isn’t the only one.
Every big social media company is leaning on an algorithm to decide what to offer to the Great God Consumer. And each of those algorithms is hidden behind "proprietary" practices that include not telling people what kind of filtering system is being used. It’s actually very scary.
Because they’re now leaning on "AI" to curate content. (We call it A.I. but actually it’s LLMs, some kind of language learning modules that filter content, digest it, reword it with padding, and spit it back out again. And that "padding" is supplied by the programmer, sometimes from pirated material with very little to no accreditation and no financial compensation.
(It’s that "padding" that people complain about. Their words or art or voices or faces are being used without permission to create "new" AI-generated content. If the programmer had copyright permission to use the "training material," then AI would be legit. As it is, without pirating other peoples’ content, they don’t have enough "training material" to AI-generate a goose’s poop.) And the way the programmers decide to filter the content can be biased in very terrible ways. From a slight bias of opinion to a full-on terrorist trying to bring down the country via propaganda; everything is being left to be decided by a handful of people spitting out a string of keywords.)
It’s like, "Welcome to our archive. The tags are all lies and there are no moderators on staff. All nuance is lost. Metaphorical eye-bleaching stations are to the left. You have been indoctrinated. One of us! One of us!"
And most of the videos recommended are TERRIBLE. Just completely out of my wheelhouse. Do not want.
So like, not only do I have to worry about being mentally conditioned by the content I’m recommended… the content itself is objectively Not My Bag. For reals, I would have a better time if the algorithm actually fed me content I would enjoy.
It’s like, "You guys are boiling the oceans and burning the atmosphere. Just totally destroying the planet. And you can’t get simple algorithms to work???"
Your AI is wonk as shit.
You should have just paid your employees to do a better job rather than nuking everything for the AI option.
It’s NOT artificial intelligence.
There is no sentience there.
And if there was ever a possibility of an LLM reaching singularity and gaining true self-willed sentience… We’d be fucked.
They show those LLMs processing content and offering "Kill all humans" as the best option to protect the planet. And that’s bad enough.
But there’s also the LLMs offering poison recipes when someone just wants to make dinner.
A sentience born from pirated content and filtered through the lens of a misanthrope and lacking the ability to correctly parse content would be a nightmare. Especially if it had full control of search engines.
Because search engine algorithms are currently horrible. Nobody is moderating SEO terms
I tried to look up "trumpet account," which is a term used in Chinese novels for non-work related social media accounts. But I wanted to check whether they’re mostly intended to celebrate idols and other celebrities the user is fanning on, rather than just being everyday accounts.
Because if a trumpet account is purely intended as a fan account, I don’t want to use that term when I mean something different.
Yet the only search results I could get were about the musical instrument and a few ads for an inn in a different state from me.
So really, this whole thing has been about me being Big Mad at algorithms and SEO abuse.
What a twist (Shyamalan hands).
Anyways, have a good day and a better year.
And don’t forget to hold the egg council accountable for their price gouging! Their record profits are stealing from the poor to feed the rich, and that should be a crime if the rich weren’t in charge.
~Harper Kingsley
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