Sam Liebeskind

Instead of asking whether or not a platform optimizes for engagement, it can be more helpful to ask how explicit or implicit these engagement signals are, and provide users with more controls to allow them to tweak their online experience.

However, some types of engagement, such as votes and likes, come from controls designed to solicit feedback, while other types of engagement, such as clicks and watch time, are more implicit. In general both implicit and explicit engagement signals provide distinct and useful information to recommenders.

As Cosma and I, and Alison and James have written:

We now have a technology that does for written and pictured culture what largescale markets do for the economy, what large-scale bureaucracy does for society, and perhaps even comparable with what print once did for language. What happens next?

But he saw AI (a term that he had ambiguous feelings about) as a particular variant of a much broader phenomenon: “complex information processing.” Human beings have quite limited internal ability to process information, and confront an unpredictable and complex world. Hence, they rely on a variety of external arrangements that do much of their inf... See more

To understand the social consequences of LLMs and related forms of AI, we ought consider them as social technologies. Specifically, we should compare them and their workings to other social technologies (or, if you prefer, modes of governance), mapping out how they transform social, political and economic relations among human beings.

The key transformation that needs to occur is from a logic of open source development to a more complex logic of commons-based governance.

If this is all downstream of a small and relatively well-off group of high frequency posters (some of our elected officials among them), that would suggest what we might call an ‘elite radicalization’ theory of online politics. The idea is that social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the pe... See more