Honestly I think it's more insidious than that, or at least more depressing. I suspect it's primarily ad revenue optimization, potentially not even driven by humans at least primarily. There may be an element of some grand conspiracy, but it feels more likely that a bunch of self important c-suite executives dictated the use of machine learning to increase profits and ragebait sells which I'm sure machine learning models have picked up on. It's likely not a simple system driving this crap (which I am now fueling myself, my cue to go look at cute animals I guess).
And if it was classifying things accidentally into generating $$ through interaction with topics that didn't serve the political interests of the execs then it would be trained out of it real quick.
Not necessarily. Like I said, this is a complex system of systems and I suspect machine learning is driving a great deal of it (and by extension the people themselves). At the end of the day we don't know what systems are in play (and they likely are different for each company/interest group so there is every possibility that both statements are true), but I don't think we should just throw out Occam's razor and assume a gigantic conspiracy when other plausible alternatives exist. We have a new technology that was unveiled and really took off around 2017 with transformers and had research undergoing before then with Alexnet really kicking off the current machine learning craze.
Obviously there will be people who want to push their own messages, but I suspect that is a bit overblown to be honest. You can train models to do very abstract tasks and LLMs don't really betray just how abstract these models can get.
It's not really a gigantic conspiracy when they tell you openly that they are pushing culture war as a lead to yank people around with and influence their political intent through rage and clickbait: like Bannon is on record talking about how he used Gamergate to stoke young men into right wing culture war and captivate them into the right, and Elon can't stop getting into culture wars or messing with mechahitler, and before all of that zuck was neck deep in it with cambridge analytica
Except it would be. The amount of people that would be required to go along with that would be absurd. This isn't just Bannon or Elon snapping their fingers and magically manipulating people, it's systems that take immense resources to train and execute and finetune which requires many high level engineers from many different specialties and large administrative actions most likely which consists of people who just so happen to more often than not lean to the progressive side. As I said, there is undoubtedly attempts to manipulate people for political gain. But I highly suspect people are underestimating the ML models that comprise these systems effectively running with their optimization signal and gaming social media.
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u/kinglywy 15h ago
What happened to the sub? Literally the only thing I see now is this case.
This all feels forced it's a messed up case but the amount it's being shoved down our throats feels like there is other motives at play.