It's creepy when a system that knows you better than you know yourself shows you ads.

· Bits and Bobs 3/23/26
  • It's creepy when a system that knows you better than you know yourself shows you ads.
    • The ads are a form of manipulation, if it knows what makes you tick it can be extremely persuasive.
    • Pre-LLM systems could do this, but only by distilling crowd sourced revealed preferences.
      • The system didn't understand you, it just knew how to show you ads that worked for people like you.
      • Google never knew you better than you know yourself.
      • It could mechanistically remember everything you told it, but figuring out your implied innermost desires was not something it could do.
    • But LLMs allow the system to understand you and decide a plan to best get you to align with the system's goals.
    • A conflict of interest is inescapable.

More on this topic

From other episodes