With "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flatten Culture" out this week, it was the perfect time to revisit my @Flipboard podcast interview with @chaykak and turn his picks into a newsletter.
See which book, artist, author and home appliance the New Yorker writer thinks are essential. (One is from 1933!)
With AI-generated content flooding the internet and algorithms ruling social media platforms, do we truly understand what we even like and enjoy anymore? Esquire interviews Kyle Chayka, author of "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture" to discuss the difference between human and algorithmic gatekeepers and the result of consuming the equivalent of cultural junk food.
Don’t know what to make of all these low-fi #Mando ads—and there are so many—that the #IG algos are feeding me that feature the lady who expresses all that urgency. #advertising#instagram#algorithms
"I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us all." #BigTech#algorithms
Is anybody working on algorithmic, engagement-led feed generation for Mastodon?
Serious question. One reason I still visit & use Twitter is: there are people in other time zones whose fediverse content is basically unseen by me, since they post at times when I’m parenting/asleep and so are buried under a chronological timeline.
Mostly they also post to Twitter which mostly automatically solves that problem for me.
I remember sometime around 2008 – or whenever it was that “information overload” was fashionable to complain about – reading a tweet from somebody saying “there is so much traffic on Twitter that I can no longer read every tweet” [presumably of people that they followed]
It would be good for Mastodon to start addressing that.
Does anyone know what kind of posts the Mastodon/Fediverse algorithms favour? The traditional wisdom is that T/X favours pictures and lots of hashtags. What's the formula here? #mastodon#fediverse#algorithms#pictures#hashtags
#Algorithms#AlgorithmicDecisionMaking#Automation: "De Liban, the Legal Aid lawyer, told me that trying to fix the algorithm sometimes distracts from the need to fix the underlying policy problem. Algorithmic decision-making is predisposed to inflict harm if it is introduced to triage support in a benefits system that is chronically underfunded and set up to treat beneficiaries as suspects rather than rights-holders. By contrast, benefits automation is more likely to promote transparency, due process, and “equitable outcomes” if it is rooted in long-term investments to increase benefit levels, simplify enrollment, and improve working conditions for caregivers and caseworkers.
Policymakers should not let hype about generative AI or speculation about its existential risks distract them from the urgent task of addressing the harms of AI systems that are already among us. Failing to heed lessons from AI’s past and present will doom us to repeat the same mistakes."
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Algorithms#AI#Disinformation: "We need to clean up our online platforms. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a research, advocacy, and policy organization working to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation, has called for the adoption of its STAR Framework (Safety by Design, Transparency, Accountability, and Responsibility). This would ensure that digital products and services are safe before they are launched; increase transparency around algorithms, rule enforcement, and advertising; and work to hold companies both accountable to democratic and independent bodies, and responsible for omissions and actions that lead to harm. The EU’s Digital Services Act is a step in the right direction of regulation, including provisions to ensure that independent researchers can monitor social network platforms. However, these provisions will take years to be actionable. The UK’s Online Safety Bill—slowly making its way through the policy process—could also help, but again, these provisions will take time to implement. Until then, the transition from social media to AI-mediated information means that, in 2024, a new digital dark age will likely begin."
#AI#HR#Algorithms: "If you’ve worried that candidate-screening algorithms could be standing between you and your dream job, reading Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm won’t ease your mind. The investigative reporter and NYU journalism professor’s new book demystifies how HR departments use automation software that not only propagate bias, but fail at the thing they claim to do: find the best candidate for the job.
Schellmann posed as a prospective job hunter to test some of this software, which ranges from résumé screeners and video-game-based tests to personality assessments that analyze facial expressions, vocal intonations, and social media behavior. One tool rated her as a high match for a job even though she spoke nonsense to it in German. A personality assessment algorithm gave her high marks for “steadiness” based on her Twitter use and a low rating based on her LinkedIn profile.
It’s enough to make you want to delete your LinkedIn account and embrace homesteading, but Schellmann has uplifting insights too. In an interview that has been edited for length and clarity, she suggested how society could rein in biased HR technology and offered practical tips for job seekers on how to beat the bots."
Once again on the commercial socia media platforms I’m seeing opinions stating that with the algorithmic social medias like Threads we can’t follow the news ans events of the world properly and any ”old Twitter-like” social channel no longer exist. While I agree with the first, I completely disagree with the latter. The social web movement in the Fediverse is just that. And this is just a beginning.
As if Instagram wasn't bad enough already, I just realised they've removed the "recent posts" option for hashtags. So there's almost no way for someone without billions of followers to be discovered that way.
Christ I hate Meta's manipulative, algorithm-heavy approach. Let's never have algorithms here, they're so isolating. You can end up feeling entirely ignored if you're not serving up what the algorithm likes.
#EU#Algorithms#AI#AIAct#SocialMedia#Surveillance#ContentModeration: "These successes are small compared to the energy deployed to build and deploy automated systems in Europe. Our most significant setback probably occurred on 13 September, when the president of the European Commission said in her state of the Union address that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”. The sentence may be innocuous in itself. However, it reveals that the ideology that considers AI might become godlike has permeated the highest echelons of political power. One of the problems of this ideology is that it disregards the current, actual risks and failures of automated systems, making it much harder to find solutions and help people affected.
How do we go forward in such an environment? The chances that algorithmic systems will strengthen justice, democracy, and sustainability (AlgorithmWatch’s mission) in 2024 are slim. I do not expect PimEyes to remove the pictures it has of me. And I do not expect top politicians to stop using a social network where algorithms automatically favor far-right extremists."
I'm writing a new big book on software performance and scalability
If you'd like to see early chapter drafts from it, and potentially give me a little feedback (or answer a few simple questions I ask of you, about your impressions), in private? please let me know
“Algorithms have been around since antiquity; the digital computer merely automates the execution of algorithms using increasingly large sets of inputs and variables. But digital algorithms represents a crystallization of social relations. In effect, implicit rules, protocols, and norms embedded in our social structure find their way into digital algorithms, often without being noticed or considered.”
#AI#Automation#LLMs#Algorithms "What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence"—a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind, such as in its complex neural networks. Matteo Pasquinelli argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations. Here he is interviewed by Richard Hames, audio producer at Novara Media." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0wECTKNmlY
The #israel far right are completely crazy: If Netanyahu and his pundits think this level of carnage in #gaza would not make millions of people consider picking up arms in revenge, they are mad.
So many people who have lost everything? You know what that makes? Soldiers with nothing to lose. Suicide bombers.
They think they will weaken Iran? No, they are strenghtening Iran. It’s network of Jihadis will be even bigger after this. And now they will be armed by #Russia.
#EU#BigTech#RecommendationEngines#Personalization#Algorithms: "Another policy tug-of-war could be emerging around Big Tech’s content recommender systems in the European Union where the Commission is facing a call from a number of parliamentarians to rein in profiling-based content feeds — aka “personalization” engines that process user data in order to determine what content to show them.
(...)
The letter, signed by 17 MEPs from political groups including S&D, the left, greens, EPP and Renew Europe, advocates for tech platforms’ recommender systems to be switched off by default — an idea that was floated during negotiations over the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) but which did not make it into the final regulation as it did not have a democratic majority. Instead EU lawmakers agreed to transparency measures for recommender systems, along with a requirement that larger platforms (so called VLOPs) must provide at least one content feed that isn’t based on profiling."