Recursive Weirdness: How Technology Is Gnawing on Its Fingernails
July 8, 2021
I was scanning headlines this morning after a peculiar venture innovator meeting after work on July 7, 2021. Quick summary: I talked to 11 attendees at the Louisville, Kentucky, even and each person worked for a big firm and was prospecting for recruits, trying to sell accounting services, or offering their non venture expertise as a consultant. Wow. No wonder Louisville has been outpaced by Nashville, Tennessee, in the venture space.
Now to the childish habit of chewing on fingernails:
I assumed the adults of the technology industry were enjoying the good old summer time. As I zipped through the content in my Overflight system, I noticed a few sleeping policeman in the highway to the vacation resorts in Monopoly Land; for example:
- A trivial 36 states in America are now demonstrating their inability to be Googley.
- Top dogs at Facebook allegedly find the firm’s social kennel too confining, too small, and too uncomfortable.
- A former president is not happy with the Twitter thing.
- The government of China makes clear why old-fashioned capitalism may be a risky life choice in the Middle Kingdom.
But none of these stories is as intriguing as this one: “YouTube’s Recommender AI Still a Horror Show, Finds Major Crowdsourced Study.” The main idea is that YouTube recommends content which it then bans for violating its terms of service. The write up states:
New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up, suggesting YouTube’s AI continues to puff up piles of “bottom-feeding”/low-grade/divisive/disinforming content — stuff that tries to grab eyeballs by triggering people’s sense of outrage, sewing division/polarization or spreading baseless/harmful disinformation — which in turn implies that YouTube’s problem with recommending terrible stuff is indeed systemic; a side effect of the platform’s rapacious appetite to harvest views to serve ads. That YouTube’s AI is still — per Mozilla’s study — behaving so badly also suggests Google has been pretty successful at fuzzing criticism with superficial claims of reform.
The write up and the study must be read in their entirety to appreciate the delicious business processes at work. Business processes, what are those? Here’s an example:
Mozilla’s report also underlines instances where YouTube’s algorithms are clearly driven by a logic that’s unrelated to the content itself — with a finding that in 43.6% of the cases where the researchers had data about the videos a participant had watched before a reported regret the recommendation was completely unrelated to the previous video.
This story is interesting to me because it illustrates how relatively simple methods can be used to generate revenue and keep users clicking. The notion of making informed decisions about content using artificial intelligence may be little more than magician tricks. It seems that audiences want to be mesmerized. Advertisers want to believe that online advertising works. Google wants to be the quantumly most supreme high-technology giant no matter what.
Sure seems like it. Each of the examples remind me of a confused sun bear chewing on its claws.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2021
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