being a hentai addict would make him objectively cooler than the piece of literal shit he actually is

phew

I’m sure they initially just did a ctrl+f for “lgbt” then someone on truth social who’s totally not obsessed with checking on gay and trans stuff all the time boosted a post about how it still had a reference to ‼️‼️🚨🚨gay shit🚨🚨‼️‼️

“The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don’t get too persuasive.”

Fingers crossed, trust us bro

oh cool, tackling the key issues facing us right now

lmao when have tech companies ever given a semblance of a shit about consent. It’s an industry that has deep roots in misogynistic nerds and drunk frat bros

Reminder that Ellen hung out with George w bush

https://kennorphan.com/2017/10/26/canonizing-criminals-and-the-lobotomization-of-public-memory/ellen-degeneres-embraces-george-w-bush-photo-from-the-ellen-show/

When called out for going to a sports game with someone who endorsed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, opposed adoption rights, anti hate crime laws, and anti discrimination laws, she doubled down and did a little segment on her show about how he’s alright and posted a selfie

While it is true that bush softened on gay rights issues later that was almost exclusively after he had left the presidency and thus was basically irrelevant. When the man had extreme power his policy was disgusting. When he listened to gay republican groups he did not soften at all. It was merely when his image needed to be rebranded after he was known mostly as a war criminal responsible for murdering 1 million Iraqis that he decided to soften his stance a bit. By then the Republican Party had gotten so fucking loony plenty of people accepted him as downright rational and kind. Instead of what he was, which is basically trump with a bit of impulse control and decorum

The takeaway is exactly what you said. The unifying factor here is social class. Ultra rich gays will happily throw you under the bus for 1 more dollar. Tim Cook will happily support someone who will stop him from adopting children or getting married if it means apples market share grows by 3%. He does not care because if it truly matters to him he will just find a way to circumvent the law with his enormous wealth. He does not worry about spousal decision making because he will hire a private live in physician. He will hire a surrogate to act as a legal agent for adoption in name only. If it comes to camps he obviously won’t go to the camps. If it gets to the point where he would be anywhere near at risk he would expatriate at a moments notice on a private jet. Etc. but you won’t have those luxuries. Fuck you, got mine.

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings