this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
110 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
65819 readers
4909 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hate this interpretation of black box algorithms.
We know how they work. It isn't magic. We intentionally built them to be the way that they are.
What we don't know is precisely which outputs you get from a large combinations of inputs, because it would require memorizing entire databases and simulating results as a weird form of mental math, and how we score things will be impacted by interpersonal biases even if we attempted that.
I mean, still sounds like a black box.
I think the point is that we designed the black boxes to do X and they do X consistently, just with slight variation.
If I make a cake making machine and it consistently makes cakes, its not a magic box just because I'm not sure if it will be creme frosted or not.
I mean, maybe it's just different vocabulary for both of us?
To me: a blackbox is a thing where input and output comes out in a consistent way, very functional. While the box can make accurate predictions or decisions, the exact reasoning behind them is often unclear.
Looks like we are on the same page, but just talking past each other.
That's what a black box is, but colloquially, it's also a way to call something "unknowable" or "magic."
I thought you were referring to it as the latter, not the former.
It's a little deeper than that, a lot of advertising works on engagement -based heuristics. Today, most people would call it "AI" but it's fundamentally just a reinforcement learning network that trains itself constantly on user interactions. It's difficult-to-impossible to determine why input X is associated with output Y, but we can measure in aggregate how subtle changes propagate across engagement metrics.
It is absolutely truthful to say we don't know how a modern reinforcement learning network got to the state it's in today, because transactions on the network usually aren't journaled, just periodically snapshot for A/B testing.
To be clear, that's not an excuse for undesirable heuristic behavior. Somebody somewhere made the choice to do this, and they should be liable for the output of their code.
It's not deeper than "we know how they work" which was the point I was making. I admit I gave am oversimplified layman's explanation but it is not deeper than that.