Google have a ton of other ML features about you that they fit to the model and so you have been profiled to be a bit lecherous.[1] Do you feel good about that?

Think how it must feel to be profiled to be a crook or a bad credit risk or something else that actually impacts your life and is false. It's a little worrying.

[1] Other people like you like this so it is assumed you do also. Without "lecherous" ever being mentioned or even anything like suggestively dressed appearing as a model feature. It is really, really easy to accidentally train a statistical model to be wildly prejudiced. It seems significantly harder for us to categorize it when it happens as "other similar decisions are made by shockingly violent racist and evil humans and this model and those using it should be treated with the same or more derision as they claim not be so and ought to know better." Significantly harder for many good reasons as well as bad ones.

The one nice thing about Google's ML features is that they're so absolutely terrible that what they think means nothing about you at all.

Until it stops you from getting insurance. Or flags you to border control.

But that isn't happening, and won't ever, right? Right?

They addressed the "political rabbit hole", but the powerful nature of algoriths to change people's lives remains completely unaddressed. People's tastes, views, behaviors, career paths, music tastes, and personalities are being influenced on a mass scale by totally black-box algorithms that are manually tweaked by unaccountable employees. People's psychological vulnerabilities are taken advantage of, as you can clearly see with the big rise in people faking Tourette's syndrome because of TikTok, that psychologists are now having to account for in their diagnosis and screening.

"A modern clinician needs to remain abreast of social media sources as knowledge of media content is essential in managing patients in the current environment."

https://movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10...

We've all met people that adopted wholesale the mannerists of this-or-that online influencer; gestures, tonality, jokes and all. It's creepy as hell to see, and sure, and algorithms are reinforcing this phenomenon. An "obsessed fan" is YouTube's ideal viewer, since his engagement will be through the roof.

Spotify is unprofitable, so they allow the biggest artists to pay to be promoted by their algorithms, which shapes the world's music tastes.

Fat people are being recommended mukbang videos.

These algorithms can be studied, as TFA does, and you can try to hold these companies accountable, but there's limited utility in doing scientific studies of algorithms that get updated multiple times a day.

In today's world, manmade algorithms from a handful of huge tech companies are likely exerting more influence over human evolution than nature itself is!

They're certainly shaping public opinion of these companies, and political opinions.

> Why the hell does Youtube want me to look at that?

One answer is that some assumptions that YouTube makes about the viewers is based on very broad stereotypes; the geek who’s into CGI also has a sexual side that they are about to discover through YouTube.

Sadly, your eigenvector is a bit prurient.