coffeetree: the chatbot paradigm is literally an infinite feed
baconlad: hard disagree on this. Its not feeding you content.
coffeetree: That’s like saying “I only use this one tiny feature of Facebook, and no other features, and no other platforms, and I handle that paradigm just fine.”
And some people do say that. I think both sides are right here in that yes it is a useful tool and you get to avoid a lot of the bad parts of the web, but also, it is addictive and like how many silo social media sites it adapts to you to keep you hooked, and also, the environmental and economic impact is huge. The increased wealth gaps and increased concentration of ownership of means of production is an undeniable ginormous downside of the current slate of LLM and ANN tech. Our economy was already a broken buggy system even before the gigaton wrench thrown into it by ML. 😭
They in some very real semiotic senses are different, yes. But the similarites are that they are these huge data center machines that take all the input from what people post online and chew it up and push it back to you in a way that they control and can profit from. AI is in someways even worse, an even more purely distilled version of the idea of The Algorithm.
Now, that’s social media in the sense of algorithmic silo socials like TikTok, X, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and similar. Not all social media is algorithmic (Discord isn’t, although it is a silo) nor is all social media even silos; email and fedi are examples of non-silo socials.
And by “algorithm” we mean specifically recommendation/discovery algorithm; obviously all computer stuff uses running code i.e. “algorithms” in a much broader and gentler sense. Even a 1980s BBS “had algorithm” since it used computer programs to work but in a more specific sense of “algorithm”, we mean the reco engine. The hideous world-wrecking reco engine. And AI chatbots keep that part, the bad part. They just remove the part of it that were your friends.
The comparison of “chatbot as the ultimate social media feed” (in a negative sense) is stretched but insightful and I appreciated it.