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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I think AI will be pretty good at doing recommendations. Show you a bit of random, get your likes and dislikes, exploit what the algorithm learned. TikTok does this well already and, I expect, will continue to do well when the content is AI generated.

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I work in the area of recommendations, and this is not a solved problem at all. You can only recommend what has been shown (without doing coldstart). One major issue is that other forms of content than 30sec clips can't easily utilize TikToks way of bootstrapping engagement when the item is fresh. Not everyone will understand or appreciate a "new Shakespeare" and it may fall by the wayside.

I too hope it gets better, but it's hard to replace a panel of experts that have sifted through their subject when it comes to quality recommendations in some fields.

Tiktok optimises for what people spend a long time looking at, but I don’t think that anyone would claim the metric it uses is what we would want to define as quality in the broader sense.

I seriously wonder if Tiktok uses eye gaze tracking in their interest assessments. If people's eyes follow the same gaze pattern on a clip repeatedly, that's a damn clear indicator of interest.

My personal hypothesis (based on nothing) is that TikTok just uses the very strong signal of watch time. If you watch a clip all the way, or multiple times, that's good. If you skip early - that's bad.

When I had Netflix I remember being frustrated that Netflix would recommend me shows "based on" content I had watched for a few minutes, decided I didn't like, and backed out of. Why would you recommend me content if you have a strong signal I dislike it?

AI won't be designed to serve the users recommendations, but what is in the best interest of the person designing the AI. There was a pretty good article on HN about this, yesterday I think, that covered this well.

This is the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32482523

and it's well worth reading the article.

TL:DR; AI is good at something, but don't expect it to be aligned with what the user wants.

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