Blind Faith in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and Maligned its Maligned Human Operators

Please don’t misunderstand me, this Youtube channel is actually pretty decent and has some nice content. But it also serves as a very strong example of what happens when the human operator behind an AI gets so obsessed with letting the AI optimize for algorithmic metrics (Youtube’s recommendation algorithm, which is in turn based on user usage data) that they forget that the end users of the things they’re making are _humans_ that don’t like being treated like static, arbitrary machines in a system.

Admittedly, when you look at the huge view number jump after the switch to the repetitive clickbait title screen, I can understand the incentive for them to keep doing it. But it’s short sited because it results in what me and others have been doing:

Once it becomes clear we’re being manipulated and tricked into clicking unreasonably clickbaity content with an obvious pattern, we start to get skeptical and upset. We start to make fun of the pattern or complain. We start to unsubscribe, realizing that the human operator behind the AI was so preoccupied with the new visibility via clickbait that they break the usability and utility of the thing they’re making for the other humans that the SEO techniques and clickbait titles are supposed to be appealing to in the first place.

I am very _for_ AI and ML tools. I think it’s some of the coolest tech we’ve got going on these days and I kinda wish I had focused on ML when I was back in University. But people *must* keep their wits about them when using these things. People have to remember that they are humans making things for other humans. Everyone has to remember that at least for now all of these tools have humans behind them, and when the human stops considering the other humans and gets stuck chasing metrics, they’ll find themselves optimizing towards a misleading, unhelpful goal. (cough cough, please stop buying into the capitalism hype, it does not work and fails on regular cycles and exists purely to keep the people already at the top on top by fooling all of the people doing the real hard work into thinking they’ll be next in line on top if they just work hard enough. Work for your peers and equals, not for huge rich overlords cough.)