Perhaps we're all computer simulations whose purpose is to a/b test marketing on real-world people based on their social media posts.
DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
111–120 of 142 posts
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#112Yesterday I mentioned vodka to my wife in Facebook Messenger and a few minutes later she saw a vodka advertisement on her timeline. Obviously Messenger will never include end to end encryption.
An even better example. I searched for a product on Amazon.de on my laptop, and 1 hour later when browsing Imgur on my phone, I got an ad for the exact product.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
What scares me about this is the "bubble" it creates, see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble (even mentions Facebook's news-stream)
This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's no…
This seems like reasonable behaviour when it comes to providing search results in the language of your choice, however.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#114More creepy idealism from the team at Facebook.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#115I feel like the more AI gets into the middle of our online interactions, then the more AI will try to steer those interactions. There is already plenty of evidence that our online behaviour is strongly influenced by algorithms, and I suspect this is just the beginning. One reason why I log onto FB maybe once every couple months; it just feels like I'm being manipulated.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you Yes, because they're not doing it for us, but for themselves, investors and customers (advertisers) fueled by our data.
Could Facebook be doing so well because this is actually a win-win situation for everyone involved ? That includes the people you mentioned yes, but also users who get to use a valuable tool for free. The whole "if it's free, you are the product" party line may resonate in HN circles, but you have to realize the public as a whole doesn't think it's a bad deal at all.
People in the general public don't really have a clear idea about what Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing. Still, most people I know are vaguely aware that there's something creepy going on. They aren't really comfortable with Facebook, Inc owning their digital social life, but they rely on it because of the obvious network effect.
Try asking someone "hey, you know Facebook use a lot of state-of-the-art technology to algorithmically understand the meaning of everything you post and write, feeding this massive data set into their huge artificial intelligence program?" I don't think it's likely that many people will say "cool, that sounds like a great deal, because I love it when I get very specifically targetted ads."
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#117I feel like the more AI gets into the middle of our online interactions, then the more AI will try to steer those interactions. There is already plenty of evidence that our online behaviour is strongly influenced by algorithms, and I suspect this is just the beginning. One reason why I log onto FB maybe once every couple months; it just feels like I'm being manipulated.
Eben Moglen:
> Facebook is strip-mining human society. Watching everyone share everything in their social lives and instrumenting the web to surveil everything they read outside the system is inherently unethical.
> But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labelling. We need no rules, no punishments, no guidelines. We need nothing but the truth. Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does.
> It should say: "We watch you every minute that you're here. We watch every detail of what you do. We have wired the web with 'like' buttons that inform on your reading automatically."
> To every parent Facebook should say: "Your children spend hours every day with us. We spy upon them much more efficiently than you will ever be able to. And we won't tell you what we know about them."
> Only that, just the truth. That will be enough. But the crowd that runs Facebook, that small bunch of rich and powerful people, will never lean in close enough to tell you the truth.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same, but google now for me is basically a mash of: 1. The weather 2. Stocks that have the same acronyms as things I've searched for 3. Flight information for any flight with the same code as mine 4. A recommendation of a film I might like to see because I searched for actors in them (which might be good except the reason I was looking up those actors was that I had just watched that film) 5. Sports scores for teams…
> 6. Possibly updates to sites I visit regularly (equivalent to a highly unreliable RSS client) This is what annoys me the most in Google Now. It's a damn black box. I'm happy that they provide "updates to sites I visit regularly", but even more than those updates I'd like to see the list of those sites . Without that, and any kind of information about how reliable this reporting is, I have no way of trusting I won't…
I don't really rely on them to show me important updates. I see the stories they provide me with as more of a friendly suggestion that they've found something I might like or might of missed. I don't get them very often and I really like the spontaneity of them appearing when I'm not normally looking for them.
The only time they annoyed me was when picking up a false article about Breaking bad being renewed. I shared the headline with several people before realizing it was a fake article.
http://www.businessinsider.com/breaking-bad-season-6-hoax-20...
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find Google Now to be far more useful than e.g. Facebook "recommendations", which are basically ads.
This pisses me off to no end. When I disable something like web browsing history because I get a nagging feeling that Google knows more about me than it should. Then on the way out of work I try an "OK Google. Directions home"[0] to get a time estimate or best route estimate and it tells me I have to turn on browser history to continue or some other such bs. I wonder when Google Now will understand "Ok google. F?!k y…
This particular point was rather annoying, and involved working around it in this manner:
Me: "OK Google, navigate home" Google: "You need to turn on web and app activity." Me: "OK Google, navigate to $NUMBER $STREET, $TOWN." Google: "No problem".
But, they then decided that web and app activity was essential in order to give me commute information, and the only way I found around this was to turn it back on and start doing almost all my searches via Duckduckgo.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find Google Now to be far more useful than e.g. Facebook "recommendations", which are basically ads.
Same, but google now for me is basically a mash of: 1. The weather 2. Stocks that have the same acronyms as things I've searched for 3. Flight information for any flight with the same code as mine 4. A recommendation of a film I might like to see because I searched for actors in them (which might be good except the reason I was looking up those actors was that I had just watched that film) 5. Sports scores for teams…
I've turned most of these off. The weather is useful as is commute information, but site updates and things Google think I might like based on my searches are generally poor. There was a recent reminder not to forget to vote and occasional "are you interested in such-and-such an popular event" cards, but these never seem to have an option to prevent recurrences.
Parking information would be useful if it were both accurate (it isn't, due to taking a park and ride bus) and consistent. Like many Google Now cards it seems difficult to predict whether it will turn up or not.
Another trick it used to do was show me cards with navigation information to somewhere I'd searched for, usually the night before a trip. But, when I got into my car at 6am the next day such information was nowhere to be seen and I'd have to search for it again. Now I save the location in the calendar so at least there's a link to click, causing Google Now to remind me to leave on time after I've already left, sometimes when I'm nearly there.
Overall, it's not a useful product and relies upon data being collected which I'd rather wasn't. The only reason I leave it on is so that I can dictate reminders to my watch, which I find a very useful feature. The requirement to use Google Now for this last feature seems rather arbitrary to me.