Colin Fraser

If anyone is curious, a Meta Data Scientist published a great piece about how the facts about what LLMs are actually doing (and therefore able to do) and how it's papered over by using chat bots. It's a long but very engaging read. https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/who-are-we-talking-to-when-we-talk-to…

It’s a meme that will never die, but there’s no proof it ever happened: > This story doesn’t even show that Target tried to figure out whether the girl was pregnant. It just shows that she received a flyer that contained some maternity items and her weird dad freaked out and wanted to talk to the manager. There’s no way to know whether the flyer arrived as a result of some complex targeting algorithm that correctly deduced that the girl was pregnant because she bought a bunch of lotion, or whether they just happened to be having a sale on diapers that week and sent a flyer about it to all their customers. https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w…

https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w… https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtimes/target-r…

Here's a skeptical write-up about the mailers I was referencing. I like this view because it acknowledges human fallacies. For example, that an untargeted ad could feel targeted or that we may exaggerate the amount of ads that feel targeted. https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w…

>That's quite an assumption to make. The very famous example of data tracking and creepy correlations is the story about the supermarket sending baby ads to a household based on nothing more than their purchasing habits. While a fun anecdote, it really shouldn't be taken seriously as something that actually happened. https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w…

Story may be apocryphal: https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w…

Who are we talking to when we talk to these bots? https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/who-are-we-talking-to-when-we-talk-to… "It is an intentional choice to present this technology via this anthropomorphic chat interface, this person costume. If there were an artificial general intelligence in a cage, it feels natural that we might interact with it through something like a chat interface. It’s easy to flip that around, to think that there’s a technology that you interact with through a chat interface that it must be an artificial general intelligence. But as you can clearly see from interacting with the LLM directly via the Playground interface, the chat is just a layer of smoke and mirrors to strengthen the illusion of a conversational partner."

Target and the model that found the pregnant girl (bad counter argument here: https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w… There are three options: 1. Prevent/Stop it: This ship sailed long ago. Not to be grim about it but pandoras box got opened. 2. Fight it: Tool up, change your print, your behavior, your place. Build focused VM's that you use per topic. Simply do a WHOLE lot less. In the grand scheme, its a lot of work for low return. Note: there are exceptions. 3. Increase Noise: The whole point of most data collection is to sell more to you. Because most people are sheep, a fairly simple model can be surprisingly accurate (over targeting is an issue). Don't be a sheep, diversify, make more noise in the system, search out side your comfort zone and change it up often.

The target story is nice anecdote but it's unlikely that they figured out that the daughter is pregnant: https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w…

> Target can tell if you're pregnant based on your shopping; I am very skeptical about that story, it sounds too good/scary to be true, and there is only 1 reported incident, without proper sources. Sounds made up to me. https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w…

The original article : https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html A counter-claim : https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-w… Sorry to have distorted the truth. The AD still revealed to a father that his daughter was pregnant. AFAIC this is relevant to the OP question about why ads should sometime refrain to "target"