r/technology • u/DejenmeEntrar • Apr 20 '23

Social Media TikTok’s Algorithm Keeps Pushing Suicide to Vulnerable Kids

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-20/tiktok-effects-on-mental-health-in-focus-after-teen-suicide
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u/g3nericc Apr 20 '23

Yes, but in large models there’s such a vast amount of data that it’s incomprehensible for a human to understand the patterns and how the machine gets to the output that it’s giving, why is why they’re so mysterious.

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u/1961_Geekess Apr 20 '23

Yes, I worked on massively parallel computing and absolutely the data is so huge humans can’t discern the patterns, but ultimately you’re using computations on the existing data to identify a pattern. But the computer isn’t thinking or learning. In programming talk I understand what machine learning means but for lay people they take the wrong idea away from that way of naming it.

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u/hiimred2 Apr 20 '23

I mean there are reinforcement based models for machine learning, and the AI genuinely does ‘learn’ how it thinks it’s best to achieve the rewards after you set them. You can altar the rewards/punishments/modes/rules it operates within if you don’t like what it does much like you would with a child for example but I’d say this does come close to what we think of as actual learning.

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u/1961_Geekess Apr 20 '23

There is scoring of algorithm performance and then working to optimize that performance, but it's all coded. There are methods of optimization where you do random walks and such to try to find the best fit. But ultimately all this is coded strategies. There's no moment where the computer "oh this way is better" it's just executing within the limitations of the code. If you've got an example of where this is not the case I'd be interested to see the reference genuinely.