Thread

1. mavsman · 1789923911 · focus · HN ↗

   To me, this quote just about sums it up:

   > The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.

   As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.

   What a time to be alive.

   1. clickety_clack · 1789924907 · focus · HN ↗

      Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).

      It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.

      1. mat_b · 1789926390 · focus · HN ↗

         > It’s a real tragedy of the commons

         Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.

         We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.

         1. TeMPOraL · 1789928981 · focus · HN ↗

            The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.

            1. titzer · 1789955547 · focus · HN ↗

               It's because capitalism won the (absurd black-and-white framing of the) cold war, with America as its the biggest winner. We don't even recognize the level of propaganda that has gone into convincing us all that "markets" are the best optimizer ever designed and that profit equals morality--we just accept these as base principles without questioning them. Surveillance produces profit? Well let's have more then.
         2. sssilver · 1789929086 · focus · HN ↗

            Turns out the entities you control / regulate less, tend to do things that are less in your interest and more in their own.
         3. mitxela · 1789933772 · focus · HN ↗

            Well, currently the free market is the government, while the nominal government is something less powerful than that.

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