#Enshittification#SocialMedia#Algorithms: "Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.
This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.
For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.
The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.
But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target."
I like my #aurora photos, but feel a bit of a fraud posting them. I saw only faint grey wisps of mist; it was my #PhoneCamera's #algorithms that imbued that mist with colour and shape.
Is it deceptive to distort reality with these photos?
Or (at least on occasion) are phone cameras marvelous tools, like telescopes, macro lenses, or infrared filters, which can actually show us new ways of seeing?
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..."
#AI#Algorithms#Constitutionalism: "People aren’t perfect. Neither ethics training for AI engineers nor legislation by woefully uninformed politicians can change that simple truth. I don’t need to assume that Big Tech chief executives are bad actors or that large companies are malevolent to understand that what is in their self-interest is not always in mine. The framers of the US Constitution recognised this simple truth and sought to leverage human nature for a greater good. The Constitution didn’t simply assume people would always act towards that greater good. Instead it defined a dynamic mechanism — self-interest and the balance of power — that would force compromise and good governance. Its vision of treating people as real actors rather than better angels produced one of the greatest frameworks for governance in history."
To Halt or Not to Halt? That Is the Question by Cristian Calude, 2024
Can mathematics be done by computers only? Can software testing be fully automated? Can you write an anti-virus program which never needs any updates? Can we make the Internet perfectly secure? Your guess is correct: the answer to each question is negative.
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#ContentModeration#Algorithms#RecommendationEngines#Messaging: "So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms—is everything good now? Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a bunch of research showing that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray doesn’t think social harm is an inevitable outcome of complex algorithmic curation. But he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of trying to maximize engagement doesn’t necessarily select for socially desirable results.
Stray suspects the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may in fact be … more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is you've got way too much information for anybody to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says."
#AI#Algorithms#DSA#OSA#AlgorithmicAudits#Law#PoliticalEconomy: "Accepted in the Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. For almost a decade now, scholarship in and beyond the ACM FAccT community has been focusing on novel and innovative ways and methodologies to audit the functioning of algorithmic systems. Over the years, this research idea and technical project has matured enough to become a regulatory mandate. Today, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Online Safety Act (OSA) have established the framework within which technology corporations and (traditional) auditors will develop the ‘practice’ of algorithmic auditing thereby presaging how this ‘ecosystem’ will develop. In this paper, we systematically review the auditing provisions in the DSA and the OSA in light of observations from the emerging industry of algorithmic auditing. Who is likely to occupy this space? What are some political and ethical tensions that are likely to arise? How are the mandates of ‘independent auditing’ or ‘the evaluation of the societal context of an algorithmic function’ likely to play out in practice? By shaping the picture of the emerging political economy of algorithmic auditing, we draw attention to strategies and cultures of traditional auditors that risk eroding important regulatory pillars of the DSA and the OSA. Importantly, we warn that ambitious research ideas and technical projects of/for algorithmic auditing may end up crashed by the standardising grip of traditional auditors and/or diluted within a complex web of (sub-)contractual arrangements, diverse portfolios, and tight timelines."
"The characters in the book were forever making sacrifices or performing rituals so the gods would smile on their endeavors. Often the rituals didn’t work, but the humans somehow never blamed the gods, only themselves." Why @artologica.net paints the algorithm. https://open.substack.com/pub/artologica/p/how-i-became-the-voice-of-the-algorithm