Social media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts.
We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time.
* I suppose the GPT-4o sycophancy/AI psychosis crisis was a preview, but that was just blunt “engagement” tuning.
The largest social media company in the world by several orders of magnitude is Meta, who are both using data collected from their social media platforms to train their AI models and improve ad targeting. Meta also offers AI chat bots on their platforms (FB Messenger and WhatsApp), to capture those innermost thoughts.
Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.
We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first.
Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and whole population segments, more or less conservative and/or liberal as well as more or less authentic sub-cultural patchworks were left unserved.
That wasn't even nonsense! MTV, suddenly going away? Uhm, guys, I only get Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... beep boop bop beep boop bop beep... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP... (pause) ...brr-ding... brr-ding... Krrrrrrrrrrr-shhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee-awwwwwwwww-eeeeeeeeeee... Bong-bong-bong... KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (click).
Silence ...
around here, and then a lot of popups, ads, .... you know, the wild wild west of internet history ...
We talked TV on the street and in school. And Video games. Now Netflix et al and your feed, too. Who's roofs is most of that media industrial complex under?
Thinking Meta et al and their ads infrastructure and UX weighs as much as that of Free TV is falling for a rather simple Kansas City Shuffle.
"New", only now native media still doesn't interface as well with the brain and our emotional processing as TV and "The News" do. And won't until Neuralink et al get their interfaces all the way up your ... lobes.
Forget Zuckerberg et al and let them do their jobs. They don't need publicity, they need to filter for suitable test subjects, edge case pop segments whose needs & desires are yet to be fulfilled.
There's still a lot of people out there with something to put on the market but they can't because a little something is missing and nobody seems to know why ... something double long running on the news maybe?
I’m not sure I understood more than half of your comment, but there is a significant, massive difference between social media and TV.
TV was filtered and averaged to appeal to a wide audience. By design, it could not target small niches like social media does. Or amplify them - only a few, selected people, with hard edges removed, became part of a broadcast. Same for ads, we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.
... to appeal to the widest of audience(s) at the same time.
> filtered and averaged
... feeds, websites, news, ... everything is filtered and averaged, ... we have a lot of city part of town "content" because there are audiences--already there--who are drawn towards city parts of town content and produce ...
> we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.
You and I didn't. Some folks did. Some had access to cables. Others to satellites. Some were bosses and managers and fancied their power and enough of all these people had no issue with a lack of boundaries and nothing to stay busy enough with ( or the intensity of their predilections was a little too much ) ...
Convenience and accessibility are not capabilities/skill. To some people in every city part of town, things just don't look like anything to them. Monkey see, monkey do.
> We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver.
We did. Pre-WW II ..., and afterwards, the old, everlasting Cold War (vs the new one). And there are self-emerging/self-organizing buckets of people who all pledged their allegiance to ideas and plans, works forever in progress and aggregating jobs and expanding industries. People with value and virtue systems, radicalized or called to some need-to-know duty. And the personal level was always covered by applied and philosophical psychology, cultural discourses, however progressively or decadently lead by public figures while peoples' desires were and still are shaped by interactions, social AND parasocial.
Shouldn't we stop wondering whether they have enough time, now that several hundreds of thousands of hours of work already done and work yet to get done are neatly compressed into a few instants?
AI will always be "two" things:
- a search engine that misses less and less and is just waiting for you to increase your processing power
- a tool to cope with your laziness or disability by deferring or skipping intervals of learning curves and/or biomechanics
- an evergrowing compendium of abstractions and intents, formalized or not, by humans, for humans, off humans (even when it's AI)
but that's irrelevant ... because humans will always be only "two" things, as well.
So, ... the threat vector remains unchanged, however AI, accessibility and skill will amplify or change the landscape: casually, no, leisurely ignorant bystanders.
Ah, the difference is in the richness of the signal sent back to the company. TikTok knows what content you’ll engage with and what demographic/social clusters you belong to. ChatGPT knows what you think, how you reason, your personal history, your hopes, your worries.
These AI companies, if they don’t implode, will bring campaigns that make Cambridge Analytica look like someone handing out flyers at the mall.
depends. I, for one, take control of what I consume on social media. Bluesky's design allows this. YouTube also, if you turn off recommendations, lose watch history, and vet your subscriptions
What makes you think they’d restrict this to logged in accounts? Not so long ago, Meta got caught building “ghost” social media profiles for people who didn’t have accounts on their platforms. They essentially constructed a “missing puzzle piece” based on people this person knew who did have profiles in publicly available information. Building a psychosocial profile on a user who has not set up an account yet using AI would be trivial.
We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time.
* I suppose the GPT-4o sycophancy/AI psychosis crisis was a preview, but that was just blunt “engagement” tuning.