She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.
I think this is what bothers me most about the “I have nothing to hide” crowd. With enough data about you, it’s a lot easier to manipulate you.
It’s even worse than “a lot easier”. Ever since the advances in ML went public, with things like Midjourney and ChatGPT, I’ve realized that the ML models are way way better at doing their thing that I’ve though.
Midjourney model’s purpose is so receive text, and give out an picture. And it’s really good at that, even though the dataset wasn’t really that large. Same with ChatGPT.
Now, Meta has (EDIT: just a speculation, but I’m 95% sure they do) a model which receives all data they have about the user (which is A LOT), and returns what post to show to him and in what order, to maximize his time on Facebook. And it was trained for years on a live dataset of 3 billion people interacting daily with the site. That’s a wet dream for any ML model. Imagine what it would be capable of even if it was only as good as ChatGPT at doing it’s task - and it had uncomparably better dataset and learning opportunities.
I’m really worried for the future in this regard, because it’s only a matter of time when someone with power decides that the model should not only keep people on the platform, but also to make them vote for X. And there is nothing you can do to defend against it, other than never interacting with anything with curated content, such as Google search, YT or anything Meta - because even if you know that there’s a model trying to manipulate with you, the model knows - there’s a lot of people like that. And he’s already learning and trying how to manipulate even with people like that. After all, it has 3 billion people as test subjects.
That’s why I’m extremely focused on privacy and about my data - not that I have something to hide, but I take a really really great issue with someone using such data to train models like that.
Just to let you know, meta has an open source model, llama, and it’s basically state of the art for open source community, but it falls short of chatgpt4.
The nice thing about the llama branches (vicuna and wizardlm) is that you can run them locally with about 80% of chatgpt3.5 efficiency, so no one is tracking your searches/conversations.