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AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

nevo-project.epfl.ch

221–230 of 258 posts

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest social media company in the world by several orders of magnitude is Meta, who are both using data collected from their social media platforms to train their AI models and improve ad targeting. Meta also offers AI chat bots on their platforms (FB Messenger and WhatsApp), to capture those innermost thoughts. Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.

The mother of social media is free TV. We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first. Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and wh…

I’m not sure I understood more than half of your comment, but there is a significant, massive difference between social media and TV.

TV was filtered and averaged to appeal to a wide audience. By design, it could not target small niches like social media does. Or amplify them - only a few, selected people, with hard edges removed, became part of a broadcast. Same for ads, we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#222
post #78

This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to…

Yeah, I was surprised that they didn't list dlPFC or some other reward-associated area as one of their targets.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#223
post #78

This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to…

Social media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts. We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time. * I…

Look at who is in the board seats to see how crucial 1:1 steering + aggregated sentiment analysis and coersion at scale is to these stakeholders.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts. We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time. * I…

Social media is also AI now, so I don't really see the difference.

Ah, the difference is in the richness of the signal sent back to the company. TikTok knows what content you’ll engage with and what demographic/social clusters you belong to. ChatGPT knows what you think, how you reason, your personal history, your hopes, your worries.

These AI companies, if they don’t implode, will bring campaigns that make Cambridge Analytica look like someone handing out flyers at the mall.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until the planet burns down. Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things

This is a good distinction because its a common idea but its based on a conflation: human civilizationhealth and planet health. Planet health is hard to even think about apart from humans but the planet in no way “needs” us.

It's a silly distinction. Unless we're wiped out by a virus or something similar, whatever ends us is likely to also take down a huge part of the biosphere as well - as is already happening.

"Burning something down" doesn't mean literally killing all life. But the unnecessary deaths of likely billions of animals in the long run should weigh enough to stop this nitpicking.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#227

What's interesting is that the process of identifying what gets human attention is nothing new. e.g. cartoons from the 1950s were designed to have: - cute animals - short and fast scene cuts - catchy music b/c all three of the above were known to trick the human brain into "sit still and observe" mode. Focus groups did the same thing for advertising which then morphed into A/B testing to determine revealed preference…

Books are designed to be addictive. People said the same things about books as they say about screens nowadays. I think it's more important to understand the emotional hysteria people get themselves into

One difference to consider: books require active participation on the part of the consumer. Whereas digital/screens can just happen to you whether you participate or not.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#228
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is like screen saver moving patterns or corridors with a strange field of view zooming effect. Nothing special compared to purpose made screen savers.

That’s what someone would say if they were brainwashed by them!!! Half joking, half paranoid.

I'd argue that the guys in the chair 'optimizing' those vids might be the sleeper agemt you need to look out for. It is probably somewhat personal?

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "purpose"? Something people wish something would only be used for, right? How does it relate to, what influence does it have on what something will end up being used for?

> The synthesized clips line up with what each region is known to care about, faces for FFA, places for PPA, bodies for EBA, motion for MT, patterns for V1 / V3A, and lively social scenes for pSTS / aSTS (STS seems to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_temporal_sulcus in the temporal lobe, so I guess it's the "I sense a presence" region.) Explain the potential to exploit strong stimulation of specific visual r…

Do you know that strongly triggering these regions at the same time/repeatedly/in various patterns doesn't have any effect on your mood, wants, needs and so on due to experience in the field? Or why are you just discounting the idea?

IMO it's terrifying to imagine that adtech companies could plug this stuff into their optimizers and just run an experiment on broad swaths of the population to figure out if there's any effects.

Re: AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

#230
This… wow… should be tightly regulated and illegal to use on the general population.

Literally hijacking people’s neural activation pathways on a mass scale that can’t be easily blocked, unless you look away or start meditating.

Are there any other precedents for this kind of neural-subterfuge being released into the wild, effectively lowering the barrier to mass manipulation?

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