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The darkest monetization is biased output from the bot.

Tech question? Steer you to its cloud. Medical question? Steer you towards a sponsored treatment. Or maybe the mechanism of injury needs this lawyer to compensate?

Oh and I infer from your chat history you're about to expect a child. That house is probably too small now, so our realtor in that neighborhood can help!

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[Recycling a joke from many months ago]

My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s

Just like The Truman Show, where every friend (every bot) you talk to is a secretly paid shill with a hidden agenda.


His response is what comes to mind whenever I encounter an obvious bot reply online. "What the hell are you talking about?"

I worry that the effective evil stuff, perhaps almost by definition, won't be nearly as comedically ham-handed for the benefit of audience understanding.

>Just like The Truman Show, where every friend (every bot) you talk to is a secretly paid shill with a hidden agenda.

AlwaysHasBeen.jpg

The only person with your interests at heart is you.

Even if you hire someone to do the most clear cut of tasks they are balancing their interests with yours. And in all likelihood they've got half a dozen other parties who's interests they're partially juggling. Megacorp bots approximating people just adds even more layers.


The worst ad is the one you don't know is an ad. It will be presented as a definitive answer.

They are persuasion machines


The most powerful advertisement is a recommendation from a friend.

Has a friend ever brought some product up, completely out of the blue, and had you ready to buy it almost immediately? The biggest challenge traditional ads have is breaking down your defences. For friends, they're down by default. If someone is a friend, an ad doesn't have to be subtle or context sensitive, although it does help. Random suggestions from friends work.

A lot of people have friend-zoned AI and will be especially vulnerable to this novel form of manipulation. If you're the sort who treats AI as a friend, even a little bit, even subconsciously, change that. You're setting yourself up for a serious mind-job.


Ah the science of influence : the masterpiece on influence is this book [0]. Came my way by a mention in one of Charlie Munger’s speeches. All the things you mention here and more are there in case you want to broaden your understanding

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence


This is quaint. The darkest monetization is turning it into 4chan 2.0: an overwhelming psyop to mobilize exploitable people to think, believe and do horrendous shit that conveniently benefits the most powerful and corrupt people on Earth.

It will make Qanon seem like a cute ARG.


I mean, money can serve a similar purpose.

...Which is also why people who control a lot of it are an existential threat to civilization.


Dude, look back on the last 20yr. If you think that sort of think is limited to "alternative" places like 4Chan you're sorely mistaken. What you're afraid of is already here and has been for a long time.

I'm well aware that the internet is overwhelmingly a psyop. I brought up 4chan because of just how absurd, influential and successful its manipulation has been. It shit-tier meme'd its way to a presidency and multiple worldwide movements that culminated in a subsequent insurrection, all the while being incredibly, well, dumb.

The fact that we have people goosestepping to MSpaint frog meme flags and mass shooters doing it for the lulz shows how stupid things can get and will continue to be.

Multiply that by x10000 and that's the vision for the future: memelords stamping on a human face forever at the behest of the Ministry of Memes.


> tech question

Route you to a shady scam center that paid for the ad spot.


^^ ad supported comment!

>Tech question? Steer you to its cloud. Medical question? Steer you towards a sponsored treatment. Or maybe the mechanism of injury needs this lawyer to compensate?

User: Do I need a permit for <petty homeowner stuff that clearly falls under an exemption>?

AI: <proceeds to behave like an ass-covering bureaucrat and tells the person to file one regardless, to their detriment>

We're not gonna go full circle. We're gonna do laps.


For sure this wouldn't be legal. Ads clearly need to be labeled as ads.

Can you think of any instances where powerful tech companies broke laws, perhaps in ways that increased profit?

I can't think of any. Thankfully, we are saved.

I think in social media and search, clear ad labeling laws exist and are also enforced. I can imagine that OpenAI will be under a lot of scrunity and it will be easy enough for outside investigators to prove how ads are served and if it's are done illegally (e.g. by creating an ad account and then testing how their ads are served).

Will they still try to skirt the laws? Of course.


tries to think .. 67 .. sigma rizzler .. AI cats dancing .. hehehe .. gives up .. yeah no. nothing comes to mind

I'm guessing one form it will take is simply by omission.

User asks for recommendation. AI generates answer saying product is absolute garbage. Company pays to simply have that portion of the answer just not appear. It will be a post-filter sentiment analysis on the original answer. Nobody can ever prove what would have appeared or not.

This is the beauty of AI - while a search engine is at least semi deterministic and you can reasonably question why it wouldn't bring up a site that is clearly relevant, AI has plausible deniability. who can ever say why it generates this answer or that?


A subtler form would be to associate (dis)favored topics with (un)happy ideas, so that wrongthink is implicitly punished with depression.

Where?

In the US.

There's a big world out of US you know?

Yes, I know. I thought you were asking where do ads need to be labelled as such, and I gave an example.

And in the EU.



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