[maigret]

No it is fine sending a comment expressing opinion. There are so many qualitatives differences:

- This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm.

- People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment.

- The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking.

Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.

[shajznnckfke]

In a conversation, you subconsciously build a model of the mind of person you are talking to, and your words are tuned to fill the gap between what they know and are thinking and the ideas you are trying to express. If I think back through my life, the communication that has affected me most as been from humans in face-to-face conversations, not on websites. But I could be bad at objectively evaluating this.

I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.

[monsieurbanana]

I also think a human can be much better at influencing people 1-on-1. But adapting his speech to two people at the same time? That's more difficult. There's only so many tricks you can use to have two different people hear what they want to hear. 5 people? 10? 2 billions?

That's the scary thing. Facebook is good enough at influencing someone, but they do it for half the population of the world simultaneously.

[everdrive]

In a conversation, the influence goes both ways: if you try to persuade me of a political point of view, I can do a number of things: (and whether these are valid or not, they will impact the flow of argument, and the success of the persuasion)

- I can suggest you're biased

- I can try to change the subject

- I can decide you're a bad person for holding the "wrong" views

- I can directly argue against your point

- I can attack the structure of your argument

- I can make an emotional appeal regarding why I must hold my point of view

- etc ....

In these and other ways, I can push back and modify how much I'm influenced by a one-to-one argument. I won't always be successful, for sure. But sometimes as well the persuasion go will go the other way, and I will influence you.

This is not true on social media because another power is dictating which one-to-one conversations may happen in the first place, and then loading the deck with idea before those one-to-one conversations even happen. Further, social media changes the scale of communications. If we worked together, and saw each other regularly, we could mediate each other's influence, place boundaries, etc. With social media, there is always a crowd of strangers: too many people converse with, know, and set boundaries with.

There are obviously other distinctions between one-to-one conversation and social media, but I particularly wanted to talk about the key differences here: lack of real back and forth, and scale.

[maigret]

Look at the documentary... One of the guy explains that AI is not yet good enough to surplace humans at their strengths, but can game us on our weaknesses. This is the exact point that people think it's not having an impact on them, while it has, even so subtle.

As a person, you can get better at convincing people of course, and masses of people even - humanity has gone through that with ups and downs. Now we have a system that's working totally differently. From example, I remind reading that many conspiracists build distance with their friends and family as they close themselves to in-person discussion or any argumentation not fitting their views.

[adamsea]

Well Facebooks content is human.

Also, what about books? Ideas? Film.

IMHO people are too complicated, and situations too situation specific to be able to generalize about how someone is influenced.

Sometimes people ignore the advice of those close to them, sometimes they don't, and, it probably depends on the subject being discussed, the particular relationship between the people, the state of mind of the person in question, and so on.