AI’s Instagram Problem

Idk about AI having an Instagram problem, but I know Instagram has an AI problem. So many fake accounts with AI as actors and they send you chat messages trying to pretend to be real people. They even react to comments and can discern good from bad comments.

At first it was interesting. Now it's just annoying.

Then the Instagram algorithm, if you comment on coffee ads that you drink tea, you'll get tea ads. It will show you progressively naked women, cameltoes and similar softcore erotica. Sometimes even real porn. When you report that porn accounts your report will not even be reviewed and denied. But God beware you post the word tits. Instant harassment automoderation. All the women that follow you instantly message you saying hi, how are you, how old are you, what is your name, where are you from etc. I think they're infobots trying to build profiles and sell your data.

Some play the old " I'm a hot girl but can't post my picture, please buy me an iTunes gift card ", like I was born yesterday. And how dumb their game is. They see you commenting on a picture you liked, take that picture, claim to be that person, only on a private account, and they picked you, their loyal fan. Many of them are cheap porn actresses or accounts of people having built profiles from the pictures those porn actresses post, only modified by AI.

I am so tired of that platform. And then they serve you small 1 minute clips of stand up comedy, cats or dogs, or some stupid 1 person having a chat with themself. Let's not forget those "how do I say it at my workplace" "expert" vids. And lots of ads in between.

Instagram is so disgusting.

This is correct, but there's also some meta comment to be made that research has an "instragram problem". What he's talking about isn't really even AI so much as deep learning: there are lots of other branches that now get virtually no play relative to deep learning. And then there are all sorts of adjacent CS, image processing (when was the last time you saw someone talk about wavelets), language analysis, and other research avenues, probably often better suited to many problems, that get buried under the hype.

This is why academic research is so important. All the corporate money is flowing to deep learning, grant agencies should be sustaining the other more fundamental areas.

And I would say its even more detailed than that.

In general your most staunch conservative doesn't mind things changing if it personally benefits them greatly (especially if they don't bear most the burden of its effects).

Your most avid progressive commonly want the things that bring them comfort to stay the same, even if its potentially harmful to someone else.

I believe the issue here is we're playing "everything everywhere all at once". Everywhere on the globe is pretty much instantly connected to everything else via digital communications. There is no more sit by the sidelines zone that gets to avoid this connectivity. You may not want it, but you have to stop everyone else from bringing that connectivity too, and somehow maintain casual connectivity economically unless you want to play caveman.

Most people don't use search engines to search, they use them to answer.

That's why Google, DDG, Kagi and others are all putting summary blurbs.

Now that we have ChatGPT a lot of people are going to cut out searches in exchange for prompts.

Academic research has the same problem. When I studied neuroscience, flashy fMRI studies received substantially more funding than fundamental research. Without understanding how small neural nets work, it's difficult to construct bottom-up theories of the brain.