Seems like many are just feigning lack of awareness, imo. Casual observation shows a pattern of looking the other way when bad things are happening to people they don’t like.
Car rental agencies and airlines come to mind as well. I was almost unable to purchase a ticket for my better half after we got married as we were slow to process paperwork for name changes on our credit cards. We were able to clear the matter up, with some effort, but …
Trash mods really do hurt that place. I reported a physical assault, some punk kid with an airsoft taking potshots at pedestrians, to my local sub to warn others. Turned out the guy had been at it for weeks all over town.
Three months later, somebody didn’t like a political comment I made, went through my history, reported that earlier post, and voila. Banned for threatening violence because I warned people about a criminal’s behavior. Heh.
What I meant to say was the assertion that occasionally recommending YoungTurks somehow mitigates the right-leaning bias of the site, as suggested with the statement “then it's not really a significant force in this area” is false. The site has a demonstrable rightwing bias.
Elections can and are decided by a few thousand or few hundred votes in battlegrounds. As such, the argument that it’s of negligible effect rings false to me.
I don’t need to reword the findings to make them support my assertion.
Again those findings: “We also find that, *on average*, the YouTube recommendation algorithm pulls users slightly to the right of the political spectrum”.
The whole “on average” nullifies the notion that occasionally recommending Young Turks to kids watching Anime once in a while somehow makes up for the fact that they push OANN or Newsmax even harder. That’s like saying I took one step forward so you should ignore the two steps I took backward.
Also you are ignoring the implications further down the line. If YouTube pulls neutral to the right, then it likely pushes those already right even further in that direction.
Are you familiar with the concept of network effect?
> So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.
>> No, that is not what the study found
“In my eyes” isn’t analogous to “that’s what the study found”, FYI.
So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.
I never said anything about a vast majority. To indoctrinate doesn’t mean convert an entire population, or even a percentage thereof. On the contrary, it refers to a process of teaching a person or group (of any size) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It doesn’t specify what degree of beliefs have to change, nor how rapidly, or severely.
YT recommends Fox, Shapiro, et al to kids watching anime, to adults whose sole interests are cat videos and programming tutorials. A bit different than a librarian suggesting books one might like.
And what happens if the librarian sees I’ve been checking out the likes of Mein Kampf, and makes recommendations based on that? Does indoctrination through multiple channels cancel itself out, or some? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make there but it sounds a lot like “bad things can happen in other places so it’s acceptable if YouTube does bad things too.
One should consider the effect on those already radicalized in addition to the indoctrination of the non-radicalized when seeking to understand the political ramifications of such bias in algorithms. It’s not like they exist in a vacuum, after all.
edit: Add to that, on the topic of librarians, the decentralized nature of libraries and librarians ensures any effect of a single librarian will be limited to a local area. Don’t think we can say the same for YouTube algorithms.
I was raised on tech. A third generation computer user, started writing software at seven under my father’s guidance. A Luddite I am not, but this doesn’t bode well for our future. YouTube is basically an indoctrination engine for white nationalism. It’s more or less what the right claims the American higher education system is for the left, only there’s no conspiracy fantasy to it.
The number of man hours that would be necessary to plausibly fake even a short film in Photoshop, if I had to guess. It strikes me as analogous to owning sidearms versus BMGs and rocket launchers. One of these tools makes doing bad things far easier.
Another analogy. Say somebody makes some hacking kit. Say it uses zero day exploits to compromise Windows, Mac, and Linux. Would any of us take issue with that? Would it be a different story if it was made into a push-button tool like WinNuke was in the 1990s? Or automated to the extent that somebody who can make a word doc could employ it against your systems? Is there really no feasible line of distinction here, in your eyes?
I’ve only had time for a cursory glance at this writing, but let me thank you for sounding the horn on the on Web 3.0. It was bad enough adding Ajax calls to websites and calling it Web 2.0. At least that had something to do with http, ECMA script, html, and web-related tech.
#2 sounds really interesting! I’m not sure of the psychological ramifications, but I can’t imagine they’d be different than any other sort of prosthesis save for an inability to actually touch it.
I could see it being used in AR to conceal identity to facilitate more equitable medical outcomes, I suppose.
Thank you again for the input! I was honestly at a loss for positive applications outside of financial gain.
I haven’t seen any ads driven by deepfake, or at least I don’t think I have. That advertising bit does sound rather obnoxious though!
That is pretty neat, any sort of art does add cultural and social utility to a degree. Thanks for the heads up, because just about every mention I’ve seen published on the topic is more or less a horror story. I wasn’t being facetious in my query. Thanks again for the input!
First let me thank you for a thoughtful riposte! I do appreciate that. My question was an honest one and I imagine, not the easiest to conceive an answer to. I genuinely appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts.
With that said almost every use-case cited was financial or monetary gain whereas I enquired about social utility and value.
That dishonesty ie creation of a fake avatar is cited as being of social utility strikes me as a reach. I don’t see how adding more dishonesty and facades to the world adds social value, but then I may just be of limited imagination.
Can anybody demonstrate a legitimate use of deepfake software? Has it ever been used to facilitate a socially positive or desirable outcome? While I recognize my experiences are far from definitive, I hazard most would be hard pressed to name anything positive that came out of deepfake technology.
edit: I’ll take your knee-jerk DV, and any others, as an admission of an inability to speak to positive utility of this technology.
I recently realized you can bypass cookie auth requests by toggling reader. Led me to wonder what the EU plans on doing to enforce compliance if JavaScript isn’t enabled, for example. Kind of makes the legal obligations of sites more or less impossible to fulfill under some limited circumstances.
I’m rarely impressed anymore for whatever reasons, but even in the midst of a miserable bout of viral induced malady, I have to stand in awe of this.
I can’t even fathom the skill required to move a piece of equipment that large in a straight line let alone produce precise graphics with its flight path.
The microkernel would like a word with you, good sir. As would the Unix toolchain, the Google suite, iWork, and Microsoft Office. If it was modular, you wouldn’t need separate apps per se.
On the other side of the multiple app token, Microsoft doesn’t build out PowerPoint, Word, and Excel as a single monolithic Office app.
And I’m pretty sure that’s among the most commercially successful consumer software in the history of computing.