The incentive of social media companies to invest billions into training competitive RL agents that make their users spend as much time as possible in their platform seem like an obvious reason to be concerned. Especially when such RL agents plausibly already select a substantial fraction of the content that people in developed countries consume.
I don’t trust this sort of armchair reasoning. I think this is sufficient reason to raise the hypothesis to attention, but not enough to conclude that it is likely a real concern. And the data I have seen does not seem kind to the hypothesis (though there may be better data out there that does support the hypothesis).
The incentive of social media companies to invest billions into training competitive RL agents that make their users spend as much time as possible in their platform seem like an obvious reason to be concerned. Especially when such RL agents plausibly already select a substantial fraction of the content that people in developed countries consume.
I don’t trust this sort of armchair reasoning. I think this is sufficient reason to raise the hypothesis to attention, but not enough to conclude that it is likely a real concern. And the data I have seen does not seem kind to the hypothesis (though there may be better data out there that does support the hypothesis).