> I do think a Reddit with identity would be a much less toxic place.
Do you remember the days of "Real name" requirements on YouTube and "Google+"? The experiment was tried, it didn't change things. (Also, see Facebook for an ongoing version of the same experiment).
Humans are not "reduced" to biology. Their biology is presumed to "reveal" something about their personhood. And no matter how they feel about their hair, their hips, their eyes, etc. they ought to receive them as a gift from God and enter into a dialog with Him about how they ought to make use of the gifts He has given them.
Well, he was an honored guest of the Pope for a while. Then he made fun of his host in a published book while claiming that he had a proof when he just had a theory and was told to please stop claiming that his theory required a change in theological interpretations of the book of Joshua (but he might continue teaching his theory about terrestrial movements without claiming that they were necessarily true).
> Certainly, the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.
The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tells me that either no one thought about what else this could be used for, or the short term gains are all they are thinking about.
And the fact that a transformer model can't distinguish between the two in the context of the sentence given is a point against the general nature of the intelligence.
The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.
The problem is that it amazingly easy to bias the weights and the actual size of the bias is tiny. So maintaining a per-user ad biased profile is cheap and profitable. I doubt that "paying directly" will keep out the ad men (after all, Cable TV cost money. Netflix too. Both have ads.)
> The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.
Note that this presumes a functioning market (free or otherwise). The company store knows it is the only game in town, so it doesn't have to appeal to anyone.
Do you remember the days of "Real name" requirements on YouTube and "Google+"? The experiment was tried, it didn't change things. (Also, see Facebook for an ongoing version of the same experiment).