Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
dylan604 | on: America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
More than you can afford if you have any scruples
dodger-dog | parent
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
Carrok | root | parent
Remarkable in what way? Sounds completely unremarkable to me.

Oh wow, someone did a dance, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then..

dylan604 | root | parent
It's remarkable in how hive mind works I guess. It's mindless pablum to the nth degree. The thing I find remarkable is how it shows how easy it is to influence someone. The psychology PhDs that the Chinese hired earned their money to be sure. TikTok has to be the most well funded psychology study ever implemented to the point that the users don't even know they are test subjects
dodger-dog | root | parent
I see it. In a discussion about entertainment sources loosing market share, I suggested that TikTok was a likely reason. When someone's "scruples" were inferred to be poor by merely using the TikTok platform, I pointed out that "scruples" have more to do with what shows up in your feed (suggesting the user bears responsibility) and described my experience as humanizing, entertaining, less of a demand on my time, and provided a sense of global community through dancing and singing. It was then that you introduced the "hive mind" concept.

One tell of a hive minded thinker is when they have knee jerk reactions to things and shoot from the lip.

intended | root | parent
Personal responsibility when sitting in front of a box of candy in your own house and choosing to eat it or not is a reasonable expectation.

Personally responsibility, when averaged out to billions of people, being given choices based on the work of scientists, engineers and researchers, with no barrier to leverage your neurology and data?

I have never perfectly understood how we reconcile what happens at scale, where its trillions of choices every minute, over the user base the size of several countries with individual responsibility.

The best answer I have is that it should be a fair fight / Fair choice. There should be a reasonable expectation of what the average outcome in a given situation is, and the players should have equal ability to engage in that transaction.

Your experience being humanizing is one experience, the average experience being dehumanizing is still entirely possible.

dodger-dog | root | parent
In the alternative: you do it to yourself, lack the emotional maturity, responsibility, and fortitude to even begin to do anything about it, and to protect your fragile sense of self worth and self-deceptive identity from the cognitive dissonance, blame evil scientists, engineers, and researchers for controlling you beyond what any human agency could possibly be expected to resist. Poor fellow.
intended | root | parent
Individual responsibility != behavior at scale.

I mean, If what I said affected your world view to the point that you have to respond the way you did, I am not sure what can be said to make it better for you.

This is the field of my work, so I know with certainty the point I am making.

My response to the situation was to learn and understand it so that it can be made better for normal people. So that they have an actual fair chance.

I assume you have the ability to acknowledge the difference between a single individual’s choice at one moment, and the choices of that individual at different times of the day.

Firms don’t bet on a single human making a reasonable choice. The bet that given enough humans, enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm.

Even individual agency shifts at different times, which is why food ads play at specific time slots.

No one is an island.

dodger-dog | root | parent
You are distinguishing between my one example of an almost entirely pleasant, life-affirming TikTok feed and a model of a large-scale TikTok feed experience at a societal level. Ok, yes, those two things are not the same. Good luck in your vocation.

You know that the TikTok feeds are superior at giving the user what engages them and keeps them logged in. I think that is part of your point. You then introduce a "firms don't bet on a single human making a reasonable choice," and that they bet that "enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm." This is a conflation that you are making that you might think is necessary to support your hypothesis that the evil scientist, engineers, and researchers are twisting minds.

You can criticize them for making the product too responsive and addicting—sort of like you could criticize Frito Lay for the same thing. What you cannot argue is that the software engineers are trying to make the users bad, stupid, or fat.

Which returns to the original part of this discussion. I said that TikTok was replacing legacy media. When using TikTok was morally questioned, I responded that the output that is consumed is largely determined by the user, and I citied my experience of that.

If you are not saying that TikTok is purposively altering "normal" people in a negative way, but that simply the addictive nature of the software is leading to "normal" people to affect themselves in a negative way because of their choices and tastes, and that it is your job to help force TikTok to change the approach to maximizing engagement in order to protect the users from their bad choices and tastes, then you've got another argument on your hands entirely—one that has many levels that are open to attack.

Let's start with one: who are you to tell us who the "normal" people are, what they should be watching and how much of it, and how do you determine that? Maybe you work in a data role in this "field". What do you call that field? User experience? Information control? "Normal" individual taste and media consumption formation? All very interesting questions.

To go from working with the data to making the claims you have made, you are going to have to button those arguments up a lot.