Thread from an ex-YouTube whistleblower on their dangerous recommendation engine

5/

Brian’s hyper-engagement slowly biases YouTube:

1/ People who spend their lives on YT affect recommendations more

2/ So the content they watch gets more views

3/ Then youtubers notice and create more of it

4/ And people spend even more time on that content. of YT vicious circle: two years ago I found out that many conspiracies were promoted by the AI much more than truth, for instance flat earth videos were promoted ~10x more than round earth ones was not the only one to notice AI harms. @google’s @fchollet, the danger of AI then many newspapers spoke about AI harms, as for instance: @wsj @guardian @nytimes @BuzzFeed @washingtonpost @bloomberg @huffpost @dailybeast @vox @NBCNews @VICE @cjr @techreview

Journalism matters

10/

There are 2 ways to fix vicious circles like with “flat earth”

1) make people spend more time on round earth videos

2) change the AI

YouTube’s economic incentive is for solution 1).

Source: threader.app