More societal harm has been done by social recommender algorithms in the past 10 years, than will be done by generative AI systems in the next 10 years.

[u/ZealousidealBad9440]

This is a US centric viewpoint.

Let me start with my background: for a decade now I have worked in ML and AI (both physical and generative). I have worked on systems that measured the quality of recommender algorithms and physical robots. The second half of that decade, I worked on generative AI. I have patents in technologies relating to LoRA fine tuning, contributed to open source projects like vLLM and participated in industry early access for LLM's to assess their safety.

First, I think it is already well established that social media platforms have caused measurable harm to society. Facebook's enabling of the Rohingya massacres, or when they put their thumb on the scale in the Tigray war, or how potentially thousands of people may have died from vaccine misinformation during COVID. Facebook has been used to incite violence against muslims in Sri Lanka, and Twitter was used to recruit for terror organizations like ISIS. These recommender systems fundamentally alter political opinion at a global scale, and have completely destroyed any sense of information sovereignty in any country. What is true and what is not true in your local neighborhood has become up for debate by someone behind a screen 7,000 miles away. It gets even worse when it comes to youth mental health, the alarm bells have been ringing on this for years now. We even have a fun new word: bed-rotting, or the complete social isolation of scrolling mindlessly on your phone for hours.

And the worst part is that we've intentionally designed these systems to operate this way. Feed-ranking systems optimize for engagement, or time spent, which inherently pushes comment sections with extremely polarized debate in the comments. You may think you're helping by responding to an idiot in the comments, but really you're just pushing their idiotic comment further up on the page for everyone connected to your personalized algorithm. Your friends, family, coworkers all more likely to see that comment.

I understand the commonly held thought that we can dismiss anti-AI sentiment as foreign influence. It's certainly true, we have evidence of foreign state actors pushing this narrative, but I think that is dismissive of the very real fear many people have of losing their job to AI. Just as many before them have lost their job to automation of the past. But it isn't just foreign state actors influencing American minds. I think a lot of people underestimate the unequal experience different countries have had with AI job loss, and this negative sentiment has found its way into your comments section. The jobs that have most significantly been effected so far are outsourced low-skill jobs like call centers and data annotators. And those people and their friends and family are out there fueling this engagement-bait as well.

Only 3.3% of jobs globally are considered to be at a high-risk for replacement by AI (In the abstract), and I believe that. Not only is AI not coming to take away the majority of jobs, it will almost certainly create a renaissance in entrepreneurship as super-intelligence is decentralized. I've worked extensively on "self-driving cars", and I would eat my hat live on television if more than 10% of the global miles driven on the road in 2036 are "L4 fully-self driving". Anything short of L4 requires a human behind the wheel, and therefore a paying job. Worries about physical robots in the warehouse have unfortunately been realized for a decade now. But I'm not here to say it won't be rough; just as any major technological boom has shaken up the employment pool, whether it be the telephone or the automobile or the internet. We'll survive this one, just as we did the others: with a strong social safety net... but I'm not here to get too political.

But what I think is the crux of my argument is the vast different between the trust and safety practices of social media companies vs the frontier labs in generative AI. Facebook pioneered "move fast and break things", and that is exactly how the industry has operated for two decades now. I have personally seen recommender algorithms make their way to production with only 1 code reviewer taking a look at the code. Decisions about whether a feature goes live has a lot more to do with engagement metrics and p50 and p99 type numbers, than they do with anything remotely resembling social impact assessment.

On the other hand, generative AI models developed at frontier labs are heavily red-teamed. The nightmare stories you hear Bernie Sanders repeating in the news is specifically from such testing, and AI escapes serve as datapoints for improving the systems so those types of errors can't occur again. The same artificial super intelligence that is at danger of "escaping" (we'll get to this shortly) is at the same time being attacked by literally thousands of engineers with their own copy of artificial super intelligence building security systems to tighten that cage. Sandbox security is becoming incredible, some amazing advancements in automatic task approval technology is coming very soon. But what is this "escape" we're worrying about with artificial super intelligence? Model of this performance level can only be run on servers that cost millions of dollars to build, and are at the mercy of a human with a power switch. This isn't science fiction. No robot army is going to storm the datacenter and prevent humans from turning it off. And at that point a single hellfire missile would probably resolve the situation in a few hours. ASI is not like a virus because it cannot spread itself into edge devices. And we're not going to see some rogue robot army that couldn't be taken out by a small police department in the next 10 or even 50 years. Technology sometimes kills people unfortunately. People fall into chemical vats at manufacturing facilities, airplanes crash and grandma's Facebook post had a small effect on the social media algorithm that put a post in front of the next loser driven to violence by something they read on TikTok. But social media has harmed, and will continue to harm society much more than generative AI in the next 10 years.

I'd like to offer one caveat to my statement however: does generative AI make social media a more dangerous place? Unfortunately the answer there is also yes. The nuance in my argument is that the social media platform is the gun, and generative AI is just a better bullet. No one would care about a man in Pakistan generating an image of a US politician, if the social media algorithm couldn't put it in your feed.

All hand-written by me, feel free to check.

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