Comment by imglorp
15 hours ago
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!
[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.
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.
> tech question
Route you to a shady scam center that paid for the ad spot.
^^ ad supported comment!
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.
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.