AI Publishing

Remember the Golden Rule of the internet? If it's free, then you are the product.

Someone is benefiting or Facebook wouldn't be earning tens of billions in advertising revenue. And who ultimately is paying the cost, the other side of these billions on Facebook revenue?

You are.

Younger people understand this better than those in the main 30s to 50s Facebook demographic, which is why you see less of them on the site.

Question from a Youth: "What's the cost though? For you, personally, I mean? Yeah, your data may be harvested and fed into big data machines that ultimately model campaigns to move populations and societies into support for brands, parties, or religions, but tell me where your fundamental free will is compromised? Remember, you still get free email and photo sharing, which would otherwise be pretty expensive."

Answer from a Season Fighter: "Your freedom, the capacity of critical thinking, exposure to diversity and privacy, just as a starter."

More questions and answers:

"Your freedom? How does impact your freedom?"

- See how FB, google and others share(d) info with for example NSA and how this shared in turn with other governments. Also: FB was central in electing Trump who is severely limiting freedom of a lot of people.

"How does impact your ability to think?"

- Bubble effect. Filtering. Targeted ads. Our brain does not work in the vacuum, it works in a context, in fact, and all our brain does is processing the input it gets from its context. So you can easily manipulate people reasoning and empathy via modifying the context they operate in. Lombardo / the Stanford jail experiment should have taught us all a lesson on this...

"How does it stop accessing diverse context?"

- If you spend one hour on Facebook, you are not spending it elsewhere. FB entire premise is to only expose you to the content you like.

"As for privacy, it's in the terms, if you don't want..."

- I assume you are sincerely misinformed on the concept of privacy, so let me have a crack at a primer... Unfair contract terms are a thing (= there are laws that limit what you can put as a condition for the fruition of a service, namely you can't ask a consumer to give up certain rights). The terms of FB are consider unfair under most democratic legal systems, to the point - for example - that FB is under criminal investigation in 5 European countries exactly for this. FB disregard for privacy is such a blatant danger to consumers that FB terms and conditions have been one of the driving forces behind the unity European countries showed in approving GDPR.

If you’re into Python, Pandas (Spyder, Anaconda, Jupyter, etc.), and virtual machines, you can mine all of Twitter, Facebook to your heart’s content. This book is very much recipe-oriented. Unfortunately most of it is plainly wrong when it comes to the theory.… (lisätietoja)

Deep Learning seeks to mimic how humans learn (i.e., the brain processes of how humans learn in their cerebral cortex) and apply this mimicry to how computer programs are written. Thus, we have terms like a "neural network" which does not refer to a brain (made up of neurons) but to a web of computer cells which "learn" how to produce certain output from input data.

One interesting application of such is detailed in the book. A Generator attempts to produce a fake image, and a Discriminator attempts to figure out which items are fakes. When paired together with machine learning, they can produce a fairly good fake image.

What's somewhat scary about this technology is seen in the newspapers and social networks of today. "Fake news" is not merely news which is contrary to a certain viewpoint; fake news can be a video clip of some famous person saying some phrase that she never uttered! If that doesn't sound like 1984 (or 2016?), I don't know what does.… (lisätietoja)