The Content Cocoon
By: Gregory White
Tags: Musings, Media, AI, Isolation, Machine Learning

How AIs in Netflix, Youtube, Facebook and others keep you from discovering new content.

This article relies on a basic understanding of how tech companies use bots and algorithms to decide what content you see on their platforms. If you haven’t really thought about it or haven’t been taught about it here is a good primer.

The Netflix of Another

AIs do a very good job at keeping people consuming content, they’re tailor made in a million ways to be tireless experts at recommendation and timing. There is a fundamental flaw with how AIs are trained in this era and I discovered this problem first hand when I was dog sitting for a friend.

My wife and I stayed at our friend’s house for a few days and one night we sat down to find a move to watch and loaded Netflix on their TV. Now, we’ve scrolled through Netflix’s UI endlessly as much as any couple has, but when we loaded our friend’s Netflix we saw dozens of shows that we had never even heard of. There was so much content that felt previously inaccessible to us.

Logically, I know that I could have dug around and found the shows that I was discovering at my friend’s house. But I would have had to search for it. That requires either knowing what I’m looking for and searching for it in app, or getting my recommendations from somewhere else and then searching for it directly in the app.

I’m cocooned into a small subset of Netflix’s content even though Netflix has decades of video content that I’ll never see recommended to me.

Incomplete Recommendation Engines

It would be one thing if there was a recommendations area and then a discovery area for finding content on a content platform. A recommendations area would be powered by the AIs and the discovery area more randomized, pulling in things that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to.

If you have both random and recommended, then the AI side can learn from the random side and get a broader scope of the input about what a person may be interested in.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I remember many systems used to have this but they seem to have disappeared. The discovery functions of these content platforms is the AI powered recommendation UI. There is no way to truly discover through the UIs of these content platforms and so a cocoon develops.

Like a boiled frog we don’t really realize how limited we are until someone comes from the outside and informs us (or you know…we die not knowing). These recommendation engines are good, but not really good enough and their incompleteness will have social and revenue impacts eventually.

First world problems?

So I can’t find British TV shows about funny gadgets, that’s not exactly the end of the world. In the short term you’re right, but in the longer term and if this cocoon problem is copied across all content platforms (think news mostly, for now) these cocoons can mold people in really drastic ways.

If I am unable to read news from a content platform that is truly balanced (a mythological creature these days) or AI free (a poor business decision in this climate) then I’m going to be molded by the biases of the AI. This was well hashed out by the Red Feed vs Blue Feed work done by the Wall Street Journal.

When I say molded, I don’t mean “informed,” I mean molded. When someone is informed in a consistent fashion, they tend to assume that the information they’ve been presented is truth and not just information.

Until they’re exposed to something that challenges that assumption, the information they’re given becomes held as truth more deeply as time goes on. Why wouldn’t it? Everyone agrees with what they’re reading, every expert they’ve heard is unanimous. The only people that seem to be disagreeing are people that aren’t “informed.”

In a world like that, everyone that disagrees with “us” has to be uneducated or ignorant or evil, because if “they” were reading the same things we were then they’d see how they are so obviously wrong. When you live in this kind of feedback loop for long enough, people get farther and farther away from understanding each other.

Cocoons, you know…separate

The purpose of a cocoon in nature is to protect a being from harmful influences of their environment. Generally they are used by beings that are vulnerable for a time and need protection while in that state. That is quite useful, beautiful even, but living in a cocoon indefinitely is no life at all.

A permanent cocoon is really a means of separating oneself from discomfort. They separate us from ideas that make us uncomfortable, people that are abrasive to our sensibilities, situations that will break our categories. All the things that make humans evolve and mature.

If the western world continues down this path of separation and sequestration during consumption, there will be no bridges between peoples. We’ll all be fed that which is comfortable for us to consume until there is so little fertile, common ground on which to plant understanding, no lasting bonds can be forged.

You can see this in how some tech platforms are being fractured. Twitter starts to combat trolls, fake news, and hate speech and immediately an alternative platform emerges: Gab. When a platform cannot hold a “safe” space for diversity of thought, then another platform will emerge to hold a “safe” space for the minority’s ideas.

Most of the recent examples of this are because it legitimately is not safe on places like Twitter because the two sides are American neo-nazis and American people of color being threatened and verbally abused. The lack of safety in this case is because one side is violent so nothing Twitter can do will create safety without removing the abuser so the abused may be at peace.

Imagine a future where this continues, though. A place where American democratic socialists and democrats are so cocooned that even they don’t feel they have enough common ground to stand on. The silos of these content platforms will become more isolated.

Think about how the subtle and not so subtle ways that kid’s shows shape children’s patterns of thinking. Or how a recommendation engine for books could make it so that people never leave their ideological echo chamber as they actively pursue knowledge.

News is the just the easiest place to see cocoon effects in the public sphere, there are many more ways that these AI driven cocoons will shape and mold society into isolation and immaturity if nothing is done.

Diversity leads to maturity

Diversity is the antidote for isolation. It is common sense that it is diversity of experience that makes someone wise. Having gone through the same situation dozens or hundreds of times, makes one informed on which strategies tend to work and which do not.

Or how hearing a diversity of ideas matures a mind. Education is essentially the process of introducing new, category-breaking ideas to a person until they understand the world more fully. Rinse, lather, repeat until you have an educated person.

The key to a truly educated person in this case is that they get the true range of ideas instead of a filtered one. If they get a filtered set of category-breaking ideas then they’ll be biased in some way.

There is no perfect way to balance content so a person is exposed to everything equally. This is especially true if you are a tech platform maker and you want people to choose your content platform, because people go for what they enjoy and category breaking is at times unpleasant. All solutions that will last must work with the realities of AI and how they’ll be embedded into society as time goes on.

Cocoon busting

These AIs need to be treated with more respect but less reverence. Since AIs are essentially black boxes where no one really knowns how they work (they just do), the tendency for engineers when asked to tweak AI is to kinda ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and walk away. This, and the fact that these AIs create immense positive impact on revenue means people tend not to question the AI. On the flip side, everyone looks at the little robot and just curses it for being incomplete.

Honestly, both are cowardly and irresponsible. The first, because it’s rooted in laziness and capitalistic pressures to maximize the value extracted from an R&D team’s time. The second, because it is easier to blame shift than realize that all good things take time.

Would you curse at a child for not being good at baseball if they’ve never been taught the game? AIs, as they get more sophisticated will more closely resemble children. Sassy, resourceful, and hilarious children. Seriously read this tweet. After you laugh, remember, some of the most intelligent minds in the private sector are making mistakes like this and those same people are making AIs that are curating your world.

AIs will have to be raised, not just “trained” if we expect them to do a good job of responsibly curating. They’re not magic, they won’t just learn what is good and what is evil because we think it should. We’re gonna have to put in the time to make these systems mature.

Maybe we’ll have to implement a “reshuffle the deck” button in content platforms. Where it’ll expose you to completely random sets of content to give the AI a forced diversity of inputs with which to recalculate your tastes for future recommendations.

Maybe we’ll have to bring back those pages that showcase the latest content. Bringing those sections back to the forefront will make it so the AIs get more diverse inputs, more often.

There are many smarter people out there that will have better ideas, I’m sure. But the fundament truth is that the AIs need diversity in their life if they’ll bring any of that to us.

Until then, keep trying to bust the cocoons. Because every time you do, an AI is watching and scratching its head and their creator has to go back to the drawing board until they can better predict your behavior. And that will force progress.