[aubanel]

This 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.

[anon373839]

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.

[fcarraldo]

The largest social media company in the world by several orders of magnitude is Meta, who are both using data collected from their social media platforms to train their AI models and improve ad targeting. Meta also offers AI chat bots on their platforms (FB Messenger and WhatsApp), to capture those innermost thoughts.

Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.

[sonicvroooom]

The mother of social media is free TV.

We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first.

Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and whole population segments, more or less conservative and/or liberal as well as more or less authentic sub-cultural patchworks were left unserved.

That wasn't even nonsense! MTV, suddenly going away? Uhm, guys, I only get Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... beep boop bop beep boop bop beep... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP... (pause) ...brr-ding... brr-ding... Krrrrrrrrrrr-shhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee-awwwwwwwww-eeeeeeeeeee... Bong-bong-bong... KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (click).

Silence ...

around here, and then a lot of popups, ads, .... you know, the wild wild west of internet history ...

We talked TV on the street and in school. And Video games. Now Netflix et al and your feed, too. Who's roofs is most of that media industrial complex under?

Thinking Meta et al and their ads infrastructure and UX weighs as much as that of Free TV is falling for a rather simple Kansas City Shuffle.

"New", only now native media still doesn't interface as well with the brain and our emotional processing as TV and "The News" do. And won't until Neuralink et al get their interfaces all the way up your ... lobes.

Forget Zuckerberg et al and let them do their jobs. They don't need publicity, they need to filter for suitable test subjects, edge case pop segments whose needs & desires are yet to be fulfilled.

There's still a lot of people out there with something to put on the market but they can't because a little something is missing and nobody seems to know why ... something double long running on the news maybe?

[ricardobeat]

I’m not sure I understood more than half of your comment, but there is a significant, massive difference between social media and TV.

TV was filtered and averaged to appeal to a wide audience. By design, it could not target small niches like social media does. Or amplify them - only a few, selected people, with hard edges removed, became part of a broadcast. Same for ads, we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.

[sonicvroooom]

> to appeal to a wide audience.

... to appeal to the widest of audience(s) at the same time.

> filtered and averaged

... feeds, websites, news, ... everything is filtered and averaged, ... we have a lot of city part of town "content" because there are audiences--already there--who are drawn towards city parts of town content and produce ...

> we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.

You and I didn't. Some folks did. Some had access to cables. Others to satellites. Some were bosses and managers and fancied their power and enough of all these people had no issue with a lack of boundaries and nothing to stay busy enough with ( or the intensity of their predilections was a little too much ) ...

Convenience and accessibility are not capabilities/skill. To some people in every city part of town, things just don't look like anything to them. Monkey see, monkey do.

[solumunus]

> You and I didn't. Some folks did.

No they didn’t. I’m sorry but this seems to be pure waffle.

[sonicvroooom]

> We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver.

We did. Pre-WW II ..., and afterwards, the old, everlasting Cold War (vs the new one). And there are self-emerging/self-organizing buckets of people who all pledged their allegiance to ideas and plans, works forever in progress and aggregating jobs and expanding industries. People with value and virtue systems, radicalized or called to some need-to-know duty. And the personal level was always covered by applied and philosophical psychology, cultural discourses, however progressively or decadently lead by public figures while peoples' desires were and still are shaped by interactions, social AND parasocial.

Shouldn't we stop wondering whether they have enough time, now that several hundreds of thousands of hours of work already done and work yet to get done are neatly compressed into a few instants?

AI will always be "two" things:

- a search engine that misses less and less and is just waiting for you to increase your processing power - a tool to cope with your laziness or disability by deferring or skipping intervals of learning curves and/or biomechanics - an evergrowing compendium of abstractions and intents, formalized or not, by humans, for humans, off humans (even when it's AI)

but that's irrelevant ... because humans will always be only "two" things, as well.

So, ... the threat vector remains unchanged, however AI, accessibility and skill will amplify or change the landscape: casually, no, leisurely ignorant bystanders.

[4d4m]

Look at who is in the board seats to see how crucial 1:1 steering + aggregated sentiment analysis and coersion at scale is to these stakeholders.

[pixl97]

I didn't realize that we'd start creating Westworld quite so quickly.

[actionfromafar]

Social media is also AI now, so I don't really see the difference.

[anon373839]

Ah, the difference is in the richness of the signal sent back to the company. TikTok knows what content you’ll engage with and what demographic/social clusters you belong to. ChatGPT knows what you think, how you reason, your personal history, your hopes, your worries.

These AI companies, if they don’t implode, will bring campaigns that make Cambridge Analytica look like someone handing out flyers at the mall.

[solumunus]

Is the scale there though? I know some people use AI like a companion or mentor, but how common is that really?

[antondd]

Sadly, this is the reality.

> 59% of videos served to a new TikTok account’s For You page were AI slop

97% of videos under the #cartoonkids hashtag were AI slop

57.4% of TikToks in the Kids category were AI slop

Source: https://www.kapwing.com/resources/the-tiktok-ai-slop-report

[bpavuk]

depends. I, for one, take control of what I consume on social media. Bluesky's design allows this. YouTube also, if you turn off recommendations, lose watch history, and vet your subscriptions

[moshun]

What makes you think they’d restrict this to logged in accounts? Not so long ago, Meta got caught building “ghost” social media profiles for people who didn’t have accounts on their platforms. They essentially constructed a “missing puzzle piece” based on people this person knew who did have profiles in publicly available information. Building a psychosocial profile on a user who has not set up an account yet using AI would be trivial.

[antondd]

Has been going on for a long time in the adtech space.

[bpavuk]

excuse me? I didn't say that anyone restricts anything, I only said that I take effort to curate what I see

[tayo42]

What crisis and engagement tuning are you referring to?

[barrenko]

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.

[bcjdjsndon]

> until the planet burns down.

Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things

[inigyou]

The planet will still be here even if it burns down. After London burned down, there was still London. It was just burned down.

[nonethewiser]

This is a good distinction because its a common idea but its based on a conflation: human civilizationhealth and planet health. Planet health is hard to even think about apart from humans but the planet in no way “needs” us.

[Timon3]

It's a silly distinction. Unless we're wiped out by a virus or something similar, whatever ends us is likely to also take down a huge part of the biosphere as well - as is already happening.

"Burning something down" doesn't mean literally killing all life. But the unnecessary deaths of likely billions of animals in the long run should weigh enough to stop this nitpicking.

[therobots927]

Same could be said about any of the many mass extinction events in earth history. Not that I’m in favor of setting the planet on fire, but if you zoom out far enough it’s clear earth would bounce back from even a nuclear war coupled with climate change and microplastics.

[Timon3]

And that makes it somehow okay? You just don't care about billions of deaths?

Like, do you think I'd argue that any of the previous mass extinctions were good?

[NoGravitas]

Sure, and the planet survived the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Cold comfort to 70% of the terrestrial vertebrate species at the time.

[malfist]

You say that, but run away greenhouse gases can sterilize the entire planet, like Venus.

[inigyou]

Fortunately that particular extreme scenario doesn't seem likely. Radiance scales with the fourth power of temperature, and we're not filling the atmosphere with Venus levels of sulfuric acid. Our CO2 output will be self-limiting when it kills us and we stop outputting it.

[NoGravitas]

Sure, it will "only" look like another one of the Big Five extinction events.

[inigyou]

We've already caused one of those and it's ongoing. Wiping ourselves out would actually end it.

[barrenko]

We won't kill it, but we can try to burn it. Conflagration comes to mind.

[deinonychus]

>We won't kill the planet even if we tried to.

Common misconception. The planet isn't alive. We can't kill it. It's a rock.

[alnwlsn]

Like a burned out brick building, a burned down planet is still there, but still also burned down. Of course it doesn't 'disappear'

[bratbag]

Not even close chief.

Earth has been a rich, life sustaining planet in far hotter conditions then anything we are projected to take it to.

We can kill billions of ourselves, but short of ww3 earth will crack on just fine.

Social media emotional hot-takes dont match the numbers.

We are still screwed though.

[peterleiser]

There's always the Death Star angle.

[api]

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.

[bcjdjsndon]

If YouTube is social media, anything with a comments section is social media, even the old "guestbooks" of web 1.0 days were social media. It's a pointless term whoever uses it.

[krapp]

Youtube is very obviously social media. It is a platform that serves algorithmically sorted third party content based on user preferences and a network of accounts that a user follows, and it allows communication between users through comments. It has communities. It has memes. It is certainly addictive in all of the ways social media can be.

[bcjdjsndon]

Forums are social media. Irc is social media. BBS is social media. They all qualify under your definition.

[krapp]

Neither IRC nor BBS* use algorithms to create feeds of third party content based on user preference, history and a network of subscribed accounts, but Youtube does. Forums can count, depending on their implementation - I don't think many people would argue that Reddit is social media, but it definitely suggests related content.

More to the point, "social media" is not as strictly defined as many people on HN want it to be, because social media features have crept into numerous platforms and applications over the years, so it really can be subjective.

* maybe some have, IDK.

[bcjdjsndon]

> Neither IRC nor BBS* use algorithms to create feeds of third party content based on user preference,

Both bbs and irc had top user features that encouraged users to post, bbs certainly had third party content sorted and presented to the user by algorithm.

The reason the definition is so vague is because it's largely driven by parental hysteria and can be ignored as such

[HPsquared]

Algorithmic media

[Ntrails]

> 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

[bpavuk]

you really have to catch the moment to do this, and there must be someone else who is supportive of this idea.

my mother recently got served a quite... disturbing video on Facebook. I won't get into details of the vid. what I can tell is that she was so dazed that she didn't even immediately understand me when I asked her, "delete Facebook and Instagram immediately or else they will think you like it and will serve you more." she kept replaying this video in her head. in a moment, I thought I wouldn't make her snap out.

for context, she is a damned Reels addict with war-induced traumas. (Ukrainian here.) she agreed to delete Facebook but decided to keep Instagram. we frequently pick bones about her sending stupid Reels and me hating them with passion. and every time I said "delete Instagram and your life will go up," she brought up scandals until she talked to a therapist.

EDIT: to quote a sibling comment, this is, indeed, like dealing with a drug addict.

[pixl97]

Ah, just like drug addicts put down their poppies...

[sudb]

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).

[jerkstate]

if you're interested in completing it, check out the 30th anniversary audiobook, it just came out a few months ago, very accessible

[neon_diogenes]

Curious how the audiobook deals with the end notes? They are crucial imo.

[jerkstate]

it interleaves the end note in the text at the point where the endnote is referenced (by number), reads the endnote, and then sounds a bell to indicate that we've returned to the main text.

Sometimes endnotes reference other endnotes and you have to wait until the point in the text, e.g. endnote 304 is referenced from earlier endnotes than it occurs in the text (rather late in the book) and you just have to wait until endnote 304 is read to find out what it is. that's a bit of a disadvantage, but infinite jest is the kind of book that you really need to read multiple times in order to get it anyways.

[neon_diogenes]

That seems reasonable! I’ll check that out.

And yes, I agree. Im on my second read through now. The first time I skipped the first ~50 end notes. I thought the creator of infinite jest was a mystery, same with Joelles deformity (“was she really mangled or not— maybe we find out at the end!”). Oh, those two things are spelled out clearly in early end notes..

Any DFW fans here want to conjecture as to what “atemporal” jazz Pemulis listens to? I was thinking maybe some albert manglesdorf or perhaps ornette coleman..

[acessoproibido]

Care to elaborate for those that haven't started tackling this tome yet?

[ripe]

I think parent is referring to the film in the novel, also named Infinite Jest. The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die.

[inigyou]

This occurred to rats who had levers wired directly to their reward centers.

[Oarch]

All glory to hypnotoad!

[speak_plainly]

That would be ideal, but I think we're heading straight for Idiocracy's 'Ow! My Balls'.

[QuantumGood]

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.

[bcjdjsndon]

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)

[aubanel]

Feed algorithms are far from sorting videos only by strict decreasing order of trending factor. One example of that is that feeds are randomized: refresh the page, it changes completely. Another example is how it optimizes for bait content.

[bcjdjsndon]

If it's randomised that's not malignant. Optimizing for bait content is just showing what's popular recently. The system only knows it's bait because so many people clicked it (and took the bait)

[bsenftner]

Sounds like some people are trying to develop Snow Crash.

[tpoacher]

If you're relying on government regulation to solve this, I guess the obvious bigger question would be "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[neuronexmachina]

Yeah, I was surprised that they didn't list dlPFC or some other reward-associated area as one of their targets.

[sajithdilshan]

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.

[soco]

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.

[acessoproibido]

Speak for yourself, I would rather clean toilets for a living than work on these mind-destroying technologies

[tartoran]

I suspect OP was referring to not only working for these platforms but also creating content or even consuming it.

[pixl97]

Moloch wins again

https://medium.com/@darth.mark.23/the-moloch-dilemma-how-gam...

[nonethewiser]

Now apply it to porn

[lloydatkinson]

There's actual real people working on this bullshit. Horrifying doesn't even come close.

[inigyou]

They have information barriers to keep the non-sociopaths from understanding the horror they're working on. Military forces do the same thing. Even the German train drivers didn't know what kind of facilities their trains were going to or why.