By Leo Goldstein,
A bold hypothesis is offered to explain this phenomenon and to remind of the urgency of reigning in the Internet Gatekeepers.
Abstract
Most information we receive about the real world is through electronic media, especially the internet. Internet information processing is increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft are open and boastful about their use of AI. Humans are involved in this processing but frequently play secondary roles, like classifying and tagging news stories for machine processing, as in the case of Facebook. These are hybrid computer-human AIs. Wikipedia is written mostly by humans, but decision-making employs machine oriented procedures (MOPs) – procedures that are more suitable for computers than humans. In other words, these procedures are algorithms removing human touch, even when performed by humans. In this sense, Wikipedia might be said to be a hybrid human-AI system as well. The same is true for Reddit. There is a large number of other services and websites that use AI, and the rest of the Web and everybody using the web are affected by them. But this is only the beginning. These hybrid AIs interact in ways that have not been anticipated by their creators and might be not appreciated even now. Together, they form a single hybrid AI entity, which will be referenced here as the San Francisco AI. Only six corporations referenced above are considered as components of the San Francisco AI. To narrow the discussion even further, only Google Search and Microsoft Bing from all the Google and Microsoft services are considered. The name San Francisco AI was selected because 5 out of 6 components of this hybrid AI (except for Bing, the least significant one) are headquartered in or near San Francisco, CA. This paper shows that the San Francisco AI exists and explains how it operates and distorts the public’s perception of reality into an extremely leftward and anti-American(1) direction.
The San Francisco AI should not be confused with the leftist echo chamber. The leftist echo chamber is formed by humans, while the San Francisco AI is formed by computer algorithms with human assistance and corporate support. The San Francisco AI is a significant contributing factor to the escalation of climate alarmism, the turning of MSM into FSM (fakestream media), political polarization, anti-Trump hysteria, and other social ills. The influence of the leftist echo chamber, governments, and other offline factors on the San Francisco AI is large, but is out of the scope of this paper. Offline suppression of conservative views and the hard Left’s empowerment by the Obama administration is out of scope, too.
This paper analyzes the flow (input, output, and internal processing) of politically relevant informational signal to, from, and inside the San Francisco AI, and its influence on other online and offline entities. The San Francisco AI probably started forming in 2011, became what it is today around 2014, and has been constantly changing. Each of the six analyzed components of the San Francisco AI distorts incoming signal, suppressing conservative and centrist segments of the political spectrum, and amplifying the leftist message. Further, information typically makes multiple rounds inside of the San Francisco AI, until some spectral intervals (such as climate alarmism) are eliminated, and some rise to hysterical levels (like “the resistance”). The San Francisco AI also inconspicuously influences other parts of the web, including traditional media online, which influences traditional media offline and pulls them further to the left.
From ordinary citizens to the media and politicians, we came to trust Google, Wikipedia, and the so-called social media. Even more, information that comes from computers is often perceived as more authoritative than what is said or written by individuals. Internet company executives suffer the most damage from the San Francisco AI, with the fakestream media following closely. Together, they seem to have lost touch with reality on many issues, from the existence of the climate debate to the legal consequences (18 U.S. Code § 2385) of advocating for a government overthrow, apparently committed by Chelsea Handler / Netflix just a few days ago.
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“We see what we know.” – Goethe. It would appear that SF-AI is prone to confirmation bias and is taking “dogmatic” to a whole new level. We don’t know what we don’t know…and the machines only know what they told us…er…we told them that they told us that we told them. Fixed it!
I’m tempted to link to this in Facebook, but figure a good chance of being banned. What have we come to?
Some we will be asking a most important question:
> The name San Francisco AI was selected because 5 out of 6 components of this hybrid AI (except for Bing, the least significant one) are headquartered in or near San Francisco, CA.
Good. With any luck, that Skynet will be destroyed by the Big One.
“From ordinary citizens to the media and politicians, we came to trust Google, Wikipedia, and the so-called social media.”
Speak for yourself.
I’m guessing that CAI. is designed for driverless persons 😊
People are people. They will always tend to trust one source of information over another.
(Do you tend to trust The Washington Post or The Washington Times?)
Computers are wonderful tools. They can compute something before a mere human has even pulled out his pencil.
People tend to trust whatever info they spit out.
(Where I work I’ve seen people write down a negative number for the pounds of a chemical used because that’s what the computer said.
They forgot to think.
Lots of information available with just a few clicks.
A computer displays the information searched for.
It seems those who wrote the programs (or had them written) trust what their own creations spit out rather think.
Reddit:
I have lurked around several Reddit subs for several years with multiple identities. Some of these may only have a few dozen members active at any one time. In many subs USA subscribers are the vast majority. It is thus quite common to post or reply and have no one notice it for several hours during USA sleepy time!
However if you include something in your writing which is anti-left or “too” right or seriously un-PC (even if completely irrelevant to the “hobby” in the sub) you can get a down vote within seconds.
Initially I put this down to supposed watchers from some TLA but it happens regularly in at least 5 subs I know of and can actually be predicted when you know how to provoke it. Response time for a down vote can be as little as 2 seconds even when your text would take a human at least 20 seconds to fully read and understand. I therefore highly suspect AI type activity here based upon word and phrase filtering.
After the initial down vote some more will come along spaced out timewise and it looks like honest response from the subs members. However in a quiet sub where your liked comments may get an average of 10-15 upvotes maximum the downvotes can, if you go HARD RIGHT on a comment, scuttle up to a figure just a few short of the total number of active sub participants. This makes it look like “everyone” active then really dislikes your comment and you are in a minority of 1.
The probability of 90%+ of all the active sub members being left biased to this extent in subs which are pretty much apolitical seems to me to be close to zero. It’s hidden manipulation, it has an agenda and it’s deplorable.
Comments invited from any Reddit insiders please (we can but hope).
Suggestion: You don’t think they could be downvoting it just because it’s “off topic”, perhaps? Or have you tried the same with radical-left positions and not got downvoted?
I don’t have any trouble sorting out the wheat from the chaff on the internet.
The only real danger Google and Facebook and other monopolies pose is they can stifle free speech by banning people. Just the threat of a ban keeps a lot of people silent when they would otherwise speak up. They get a monoply and then they use that monopoly to control people’s behavior. Perfect for the Totalitarian Left.
I think “the issue” is that doing a search may never show you “the wheat”.
(Along with trusting the search programs is showing you all there is to see.)
Which is why you go past the first 3-5 pages of results on any google search. They have not gotten to outright not showing all results, they just bury them.
Thanks Leo, a very interesting hypothesis and paper. I’d love to see if you can get any mainstream research journal to pick this up and research into it further. I’m guessing not…..
Our world is one in which truthtellers and open-minded investigators are shut down, censored and accused of being “conspiracy theorists.”
Our world is fast becoming a digital censorship grid, where corporate technological behemoths like Google (who own YouTube) and Facebook rig the algorithms which control search engine results and news feeds to elevate the information they want you to see and bury the information they do not want you to see. Amazon is part of this emerging multinational corporate technological oligarchy. They have been caught censoring books such as No One Died at Sandy Hook by Jim Fetzer by forbidding them to be sold on their platform.
It is hard for naysayers and censors to deny the authenticity of governmental declassified files which show that our history is full of conspiracy fact, not conspiracy theory.