At this very moment, the person trending highest across all social media is a sex trafficker hawking his self improvement remote mentorship thing to insecure young men. His basic tactic is to say blatantly misogynistic things to get eyeballs.

I saw youtube's new shorts feature and clicked on it out of curiousity. It gave me a couple funny cat videos and some cooking content copied from tik tok... but after that it was just a doomscroll of the guy I'm talking about above, Prager University, etc.

Youtube has like 2 decades of data on what videos I watch, and it's definitely not that shit, but yet it's clear their algorithm is optimizing to put that in front of my eyes.

Interestingly normal youtube recommendations continue to be pretty good, but the shorts feature is just a cesspool that's far worse than tik tok.

I’m interested that your experience with YouTube recommendations contrasts so drastically with my own!

I watch way too much youtube, to the point that they have lots of data on what I like

> At this very moment, the person trending highest across all social media is a sex trafficker hawking his self improvement remote mentorship thing to insecure young men

Who is this? And what platforms? I'm not seeing anything like this on fb/twtr/ig/tt/yt

His name is Andrew Tate. He’s been making videos for years but blew up recently. I think his primary platform is youtube

The algorythm doesn't care what its amplifying, only that the amplification increases engagement. Toxic is a correlation, not a causation.

If it's known to be a correlation, then it's disingenuous to say they're innocent for simply wanting to amplify engagement.

> If it's known to be a correlation, then it's disingenuous to say they're innocent for simply wanting to amplify engagement.

But if it's know to be just a correlation, it is a defamation to claim that this was done on purpose ("purposefully").

If you know exposure to radiation causes cancer, then you shouldn't let people continue to mine despite simply wanting more uranium or what have you for philanthropic purposes.

Purposefully is a red herring. Try knowingly.

You seem to be confusing correlation with causation. Correlation is effectively coincidence. You can't expect anyone to make decisions - business or otherwise - based on coincidence. In fact, we attemp to solve too many symptoms based on correlation. We can't keep doing that. It's creating more noise while true root problems continue and expand.

The irony is that these machine learning algorithms are effectively coincidence machines. There's no rhyme or reason as to why they work once you have even just a handful of neural net layers, and people invest quite a lot into these magic recommendation machines.

As for toxicity, I don't think there's one magical root cause for all of it. And I'd argue that most features and designs to increase engagement _are_ one of the many causes for people to create lucrative polarizing digital content.

edit: Also I'm not sure how my original post was confusing correlation with causation. You can replace "correlation" with "coincidence" there without issue.

They're tuned to increase engagement. They figure out based on inputs what does that. There's no morality, no value judgement, etc. They try to increase engagement.

Why toxic (which is subjective) appeals to so many humans is really the question here. The algorythms has no say in that.

A coincidence is a good starting point for discovering things. A natural next step would be to figure out how to dissect trained networks and turn them into proper models.

I hope we can figure it out! I'm a big fan of explainable AI initiatives. Though I have a feeling it won't be for another decade or so before anything huge is discovered, considering how long the technology has been around.

> Ergo, these algorithms often purposefully amplify toxic content.

"Purposefully" means that the algorithms were developed with the purpose to amplify toxic content. I seriously doubt this is the case. Amplifying toxic content is rather an unintended side effect of the metrics that the algorithms optimize for.

Is it your position then that since the developers had neutral intent, therefore the algorithms do not need to be adjusted?

> Is it your position then that since the developers had neutral intent, therefore the algorithms do not need to be adjusted?

No, my position is that since the developers had neutral intent, it is defamation to claim that these algorithms purposefully amplify toxic content.

I'm not sure how "defamation" is germane to the discussion, or the original point that you responded to.

The algorithm is not looking for toxic content to amplify. It's looking for content that would attain the most engagement of its users. If you consider the posts to be toxic, then maybe you are in a minority.

Everyone in this thread but you understands that the even if they are not optimizing for outrage, by optimizing for engagement you implicitly (and objectively) serve more negative/polarizing/divisive content.

This doesn't appear to be a response to any of the content of the comment it is posted in reply to. Or indeed the entire thread.

Yes it does. The amplified content is just content that attracts the most engagement. It is not a reflection on how "toxic" the content is. If someone considers the post to be toxic and does not engage with it, then that person is not the majority of users.

This line of argument is exactly why I think intention (mens rea) should be abolished from the legal system completely. Outcomes matter, intentions don't matter. If you don't want to put someone in danger, don't do the thing that may put them in danger. It's up to you to anticipate the consequences of your actions.

It really doesn't matter what the algorithm is meant to do because it's very obvious the material consequences of what it does.

I suggest that it might be worth reflecting on what ‘toxic’ means, because it is at least unclear to me, and the term seems to carry a lot of significance in this conversation!