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TikTok and the Sorting Hat

eugenewei.com

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Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#51

Post by melonkidney »

To pick up on one point from the (fascinating) article:

> In the other direction, the U.S. hasn’t made a huge dent in China. Obviously, the Great Firewall played a huge role in keeping a lot of U.S. companies out of the Chinese market, but in the few cases where a U.S. company got a crack at the Chinese market, like Uber China, the results were mixed.

I'm genuinely curious to know which non-Chinese apps/services have managed to establish themselves in China. I feel like an argument could be made for LinkedIn... Are there obvious ones I'm missing?

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#52

Post by catalogia »

gazelleeatslion wrote: post #46

Modern day tobacco. 100% unregulated addiction. FB, TWTR, GOOG, INSTA, everyone switched from timeline to personal recommendation engines and TikTok is just doing it so much better. Where will things be in 5, 10, 50 years? Terrifying and exciting. Do these tech companies sit on research to suggest that these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error? Will they all have their tobacco-caus…

> Do these tech companies sit on research to suggest that these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error?

Facebook was running mood-manipulation experiments years ago and thought it was worth bragging about publicly.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-expe...

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#53

Post by actuator »

markus_zhang wrote: post #41
actuator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he might be referring to companies like SenseTime which were in fields like image/video recognition. I think for fields like this there is a cultural barrier which prevents companies like these from being successful in US. Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you would probably have employee mutiny at your hands. I was seeing a Vice vid…

You also have face recognition used in law enforcement in Britain too, though. And from top of my head, Britain was the first country to mass roll out CCTV system as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/business/facial-recogniti...

But that hasn't been replicated in most Western nations. This went to court and you had a lot of scrutiny on this.

In PRC, because of cultural differences I think most people accept the crime safety net you get over personal freedom restrictions and you can't really meaningfully challenge any such move even if you wanted to. Anyway, it is the same in Singapore and people seem happy with it despite being exposed to all the Western culture too, so I think it is a cultural thing.

The thing that British were the first to roll out this but we haven't seen any advanced analysis stuff out in public after it kind of shows the apprehensiveness around it.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#54

Post by elldoubleyew »

jhedwards wrote: post #37
chvid wrote: post #7

TikTok really is next-generation social media. Interesting that this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.

Somewhat anecdotal but the Chinese app game in general seems very strong. My wife does video editing on Chinese social media and the variety of apps she has for editing videos and photos is bewildering. She can add in all kinds of animation and video effects, and different apps will provide different editing experience and features. I look in the US apple store for video editing and I just don't see that kind of vari…

Because for many young Chinese video editors a cell phone is all they have ever had and all they ever want to use.

The wests adoption of the personal computer introduced video editing there, and the companies who make the editing software have mostly kept it there.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#55

Post by dumb1224 »

actuator wrote: post #19
dumb1224 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which other chinese startups with machine-learning as its core? Do you mind listing some examples?

I think he might be referring to companies like SenseTime which were in fields like image/video recognition. I think for fields like this there is a cultural barrier which prevents companies like these from being successful in US. Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you would probably have employee mutiny at your hands. I was seeing a Vice vid…

It's true that the lack of awareness of privacy is pretty prevalent even in industry. Hence the ease of obtaining large amount of highly curated data. But it is also true that these details are used as material for sensationalist journalism. Sometimes I can tell clearly (by understanding what they speak) the interviewees were so innocently excited without knowing how they are cut into videos. But I could be biased too.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#56

Post by bosswipe »

actuator wrote: post #25
londons_explore wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big US companies who have troves of user data usually have pretty strict policies about not just sticking it all through arbitrary ML pipelines for user privacy reasons. Small US companies don't have access to enough data. Companies in China have both lots of user data (1B+ internet users), and no privacy concerns about running ML experiments on that data (and observing user behaviour till they find success). Hence,…

Yeah, I have seen firsthand how paranoid big US companies are about doing anything with personal data specially media which is a good thing for users. This really slows down even simple analysis where you were looking at even a Yes/No output and makes some features impossible/hard. But they are competing with companies now which don't have the same ideological issues.

Free trade doesn't work between countries with different value systems, the values will be exploited as a weakness. Same applies with labor and environmental standards.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#57

Post by dilap »

sandworm101 wrote: post #47
chvid wrote: post #7

TikTok really is next-generation social media. Interesting that this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.

>> the effect of monopolies stifling innovation. Less monopolies, more so western culture. Many of TikTok's algorithms would be subject to great scrutiny if run by a western company. YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company. https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-use…

I feel like this is overblown, because I see ugly and poor people in tiktok all the time (if doesn't matter if you're ugly or poor -- you can still make compelling content), and I occasionally see disabled people too.

Perhaps this is true for the very first content you see, but not true once the algo becomes personalized?

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#58

Post by sandworm101 »

gazelleeatslion wrote: post #46

Modern day tobacco. 100% unregulated addiction. FB, TWTR, GOOG, INSTA, everyone switched from timeline to personal recommendation engines and TikTok is just doing it so much better. Where will things be in 5, 10, 50 years? Terrifying and exciting. Do these tech companies sit on research to suggest that these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error? Will they all have their tobacco-caus…

>> research to suggest that these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error?

Cambridge Analytica certainly had that research. Media campaigns are no longer about "getting the word out", projecting an idea and hoping it sticks. Modern campaigns are about changing a narrative, moving individuals from one opinion to another through whatever means works best for that individual. I cannot see how Facebook wouldn't be studying this.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#59

Post by angel_j »

The simpler answer is TikTok paid an ample Chinese labor force to watch and heart U.S. videos. This gives the users a nice dopamine rush and brings them back. It was obvious by the number of likes and comments very dumb videos would have.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#60

Post by elldoubleyew »

stevewodil wrote: post #6
codekansas wrote: post #3

Some really good points. Does anyone have a good explanation for why Chinese startups seem to have mastered build AI-centric apps while American startups (and large companies) lag behind? Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up hit despite having top-notch ML engin…

If I had to take a guess, Asia has always focused more on math in education than the US. Given that AI/machine learning is a lot of math it makes sense (they would have a larger talent pool for building the algorithms), but that's just one guess...

But I would argue that designing an algorithm that appeals to the human psyche in the way that Bytedance as done requires more than math skills. Designing the TikTok "For You Page" is not a pure ML problem, its a people problem that is being solved with ML.
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