Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture

Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by JohnJamesRambo on Sunday May 29, 2022 @07:56AM (#31548414)

I strongly believe this is already happening due to AI journalism and it is causing a lot of the extremism and division we see in society today. Those articles written by AI that grab tweets and post them in the story comes to mind. A positive feedback loop is initiated because Twitter is already setup to amplify extreme views and cause binary thinking.

An AI doesn’t care if humanity destroys itself, it maximizes for views or whatever parameter it was setup with.

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by marvin on Sunday May 29, 2022 @08:30AM (#31548604)

Weird that there’s so much resistance to the importance of figuring out (philosophically, practically) how to align AI to human wishes.

The problem is already playing out right in front of our eyes, and that’s with humans in the loop every step of the way.

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by 1270018080 on Sunday May 29, 2022 @05:19PM (#31552973)

Isn't AI aligned to human wishes right now? Hateful rage-baiting news took over television/radio pre-AI. I think most humans are just evil and want extremism and division. Tribalism is what makes humans human. Outsiders need to be put down. Maybe the AI is preying on our primate brains, but it's what we want.

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by marvin on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @11:57AM (#31583799)

If you dig into the philosophy a bit, you'll see that there's a distinction between "what we've historically done" or "what we end up doing with a short term, egoistical focus", and "what we wish we would have wanted", "what we would want to do if there were fewer limitations".

And to be sure, we don't understand this question well enough that it would be safe to commit humanity to our current ideas of the best solution for all eternity.

But we are certain that we wouldn't want a future AI governor of Earth to regularly and randomly pick someone to torture to death, just because that is what human drives have led to historically.

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by JohnJamesRambo on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @08:54AM (#31568930)

This is overly pessimistic and cynical about humanity. I don’t remember people I met in the street being like this until recently and the social media division started and all the journalists and writers were fired and replaced by bots and reality television.

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by hi5eyes on Sunday May 29, 2022 @12:30PM (#31550406)

To take this further

dead internet theory - bots spamming ragebait/clickbait across social media, bots in the comments fueling more division, rage.

I think any rational person would be trying to opt out of the hyper emotional news/internet and not feed the machine, as its a little tiresome/boring to be baited so easily but that could just be bc internet natives are so used to calling out bad bait on forums

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by satellite2 on Sunday May 29, 2022 @10:53AM (#31549593)

> it maximizes for views or whatever parameter it was setup with

In a way, it maximizes for its survival

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Re:Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture by hackernewds on Sunday May 29, 2022 @06:34PM (#31553551)

You could argue AI aims to destroy humanity. Then we really have a problem on our hands.

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