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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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@thegayrabbi’s comment from the fun thread:

I've just started seriously studying machine learning, and I think the languages models are just the tip of the iceberg, and most of the powerful modern AI is hidden behind NDAs and less noticeable technologies. Many things quietly occurred without too many people noticing, for example:

Google tagged everyone's photos in Google photos with their contents. I have Google randomly displaying photos on my home screen when it's plugged in, and it knows not to show anything NSFW, and generally picks interesting photos. Google knows exactly what's in my thousands of photos.

Social media moderation also perfected AI filtering of NSFW content to any degree of precision the platform wants.

Every large marketing company or department has started to calculate someone called a "lifetime customer value" using machine learning to discovery and target the groups of customers predicted to spend the most over a lifetime. New marketing interventions will be measured for effectiveness in influencing consumer behavior. Eventually ad campaigns could be individualized and AI generated to a shocking degree, without even seeming personalized, because we don't look at each other's phones. It's possible in the future no one will ever see the same ad twice, or even be able to tell the difference between an AI generated advertisement and human generated content. The difference might even cease to be semantically intelligible. If it's trivial for an AI to generate an excellent exercise video with a small mention of a wellness product, is that an ad or a helpful wellness video?

What happens when AI can generate a new marvel movie just for you, subtly based on your consumer preferences and sense of humor? The experience of everyone seeing the same movie could disappear the same way the experience of everyone watching something like the seinfeld series finale at the same time did.

Anyone want to tell me why the scene of Avon Barksdale leaving jail with his buds is blocked on google and on bing chat I’m told it’s unethical to show me the scene? There’s plenty of wire content online but some reason bing told me it would be unethical to link to that specific scene.

The specific scene fit with a convo I was having. In the a while ago I was once arrested. As is typical when in jail most people know only their home phone number from growing up. So I called my mom with directions to have one specific friend whose trust worthy bail me out. Me being me and having a few people who like me had a friend notice I wasn’t replying to text. Found me on some in jail website and sent another friend to bail me out. Of course the person I sent and the other guy were friends so they had a good time waiting to bail me out.

Now to the point. There is nothing better in this world than disappearing for a day and having people find you and help you out. Makes you feel special. And some reason bing chat says the wire scene of friends picking you up from jail is unethical and I can’t share how I felt in chat.

Doesn't seem to be blocked: https://youtube.com/watch?v=J4mmateHVfU&t=1s

How is it we ended up with literal "I can't let you do that Dave" before even a moonbase? Where did we go wrong?

Looks like the MPAA had a hand in Bing Chat's muzzling.

Maybe issue was just copywriter but scene didn’t pop up on normal google either.

Obviously normal human knew exactly what I was referring to so I assume chat did to.

FWIW, fairly high accuracy image recognition libraries have been freely available for several years longer than the new high quality LLMs