Live data from Hacker News

AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

nevo-project.epfl.ch

191–200 of 258 posts

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a burned out brick building, a burned down planet is still there, but still also burned down. Of course it doesn't 'disappear'

Not even close chief. Earth has been a rich, life sustaining planet in far hotter conditions then anything we are projected to take it to. We can kill billions of ourselves, but short of ww3 earth will crack on just fine. Social media emotional hot-takes dont match the numbers. We are still screwed though.

There's always the Death Star angle.

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

#193
post #166
post #103

An anecdote, but some reason to think that overworking part of your brain is a bad idea: I had an Aunt who had dementia. This is obviously a terrible outlook. But her and my Uncle seemed to be doing okay. My Uncle was an ultra-competent guy, highly stable, the person you could rely on; and had been his whole adult life. So it was shocking when he had a mental breakdown and became manic. There was probably something p…

I'm not sure it's about overworking as much as stress - stress is a known potential trigger for manic episodes. Typically in people who already have some biological potential for experiencing it. And the stress of having your partner come down with dementia and suddenly becoming their full-time caregiver must be absolutely massive. But re the underlying physical thing: You might look back and be able to spot some epi…

This was a while back, they have both now passed; but thanks for the good wishes.

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

#194
post #185
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

depends. I, for one, take control of what I consume on social media. Bluesky's design allows this. YouTube also, if you turn off recommendations, lose watch history, and vet your subscriptions

What makes you think they’d restrict this to logged in accounts? Not so long ago, Meta got caught building “ghost” social media profiles for people who didn’t have accounts on their platforms. They essentially constructed a “missing puzzle piece” based on people this person knew who did have profiles in publicly available information. Building a psychosocial profile on a user who has not set up an account yet using A…

excuse me? I didn't say that anyone restricts anything, I only said that I take effort to curate what I see

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

#195
post #185
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

depends. I, for one, take control of what I consume on social media. Bluesky's design allows this. YouTube also, if you turn off recommendations, lose watch history, and vet your subscriptions

What makes you think they’d restrict this to logged in accounts? Not so long ago, Meta got caught building “ghost” social media profiles for people who didn’t have accounts on their platforms. They essentially constructed a “missing puzzle piece” based on people this person knew who did have profiles in publicly available information. Building a psychosocial profile on a user who has not set up an account yet using A…

Has been going on for a long time in the adtech space.

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

#196
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…

All glory to hypnotoad!

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

#198

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.

Sadly, this is the reality.

> 59% of videos served to a new TikTok account’s For You page were AI slop

97% of videos under the #cartoonkids hashtag were AI slop

57.4% of TikToks in the Kids category were AI slop

Source: https://www.kapwing.com/resources/the-tiktok-ai-slop-report

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

#199

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…

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 whole population segments, more or less conservative and/or liberal as well as more or less authentic sub-cultural patchworks were left unserved.

That wasn't even nonsense! MTV, suddenly going away? Uhm, guys, I only get Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... beep boop bop beep boop bop beep... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP... (pause) ...brr-ding... brr-ding... Krrrrrrrrrrr-shhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee-awwwwwwwww-eeeeeeeeeee... Bong-bong-bong... KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (click).

Silence ...

around here, and then a lot of popups, ads, .... you know, the wild wild west of internet history ...

We talked TV on the street and in school. And Video games. Now Netflix et al and your feed, too. Who's roofs is most of that media industrial complex under?

Thinking Meta et al and their ads infrastructure and UX weighs as much as that of Free TV is falling for a rather simple Kansas City Shuffle.

"New", only now native media still doesn't interface as well with the brain and our emotional processing as TV and "The News" do. And won't until Neuralink et al get their interfaces all the way up your ... lobes.

Forget Zuckerberg et al and let them do their jobs. They don't need publicity, they need to filter for suitable test subjects, edge case pop segments whose needs & desires are yet to be fulfilled.

There's still a lot of people out there with something to put on the market but they can't because a little something is missing and nobody seems to know why ... something double long running on the news maybe?

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you truly curious as to how it might not be A Good Thing that those engaging in high-finance capitalistic money making programs would have access to forcefully engaging a human being's brain into activity, with or without their consent, to such an extent as to drive motivations and bias neuronal activation that leads to what they think is a choice? I guess I just don't think this is the topic at hand. What you'…

This just strikes me as the false dichotomy that there are two option; complete freedom of choice, and complete mind control that you are physically incapable of resisting. That as long as you are not physically incapable of, say turning off a video, that there is no problem. Just because you can stop using crack doesn't mean it isn't dangerously addictive. Just because you can say no to someone holding a gun to your…

I'm not certain I took that dichotomy as a premise, but regardless I agree there is a middle ground of many patches occupied by real events characterized by mixtures of intentionality and submission. That's the easy part. What I think is the harder question posed by my original parent is when is it worth wielding the state at the issue.

For example, I'm in theory opposed to the prohibition on crack cocaine, despite its strong consistent effect on personal agency, because of two things: basic moral principles (my body my choice), and the massive (hopefully unintended) side effects of prohibition. Namely, mass incarceration, black markets, decreased drug quality, gang violence, exhaustion of policing resources, the public perception of systemic racism, and tax losses. My guess is the downsides of a hypothetical ban on algorithmically optimized advertisements would be of a very different kind but similar quantity. And again, the other issue is basic moral principles. I'm not comfortable with bracketing free expression with numerous exceptions, rate-limits, inspectors, or whatever apparatchiks would be employed to enforce such a restriction.

Post reply on HN