Down the Rabbit Hole by Design — with Guillaume Chaslot

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4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2019

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we press play on a YouTube video, we set in motion an algorithm that taps all available data to find the next video that keeps us glued to the screen. Because of its advertising-based business model, YouTube’s top priority is not to help us learn to play the accordion, tie a bow tie, heal an injury, or see a new city — it’s to keep us staring at the screen for as long as possible, regardless of the content. This episode’s guest, AI expert Guillaume Chaslot, helped write YouTube’s recommendation engine and explains how those priorities spin up outrage, conspiracy theories and extremism. After leaving YouTube, Guillaume’s mission became shedding light on those hidden patterns on his website, AlgoTransparency.org, which tracks and publicizes YouTube recommendations for controversial content channels. Through his work, he encourages YouTube to take responsibility for the videos it promotes and aims to give viewers more control.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's like you have this huge current that pushes you towards being more aggressive, more divisive, more polarized.
0:07.0	That's Guillaume Shazlo, a former software engineer at YouTube.
0:11.0	If you've ever wondered how YouTube got so good at predicting
0:14.0	exactly what will keep you around, Ask Yom. He worked on the site's recommendation
0:18.6	AI and he marveled at its power to sweep a viewer along from one video to the next, setting them adrift on a stream of idle viewing time.
0:25.8	He celebrated as these streams multiplied and gathered strength, but he also detected an alarming undercurrent.
0:33.0	It was always giving you the same kind of content that you've already watched.
0:38.0	He couldn't get away from that.
0:40.0	So you couldn't discover new things.
0:42.0	You couldn't expand your brain. You couldn't expand your brain.
0:43.8	You couldn't see other point of views.
0:46.8	You were only going to go down a rabbit hole by design.
0:52.0	To understand where these algorithms might take a viewer, consider for a moment how they're designed.
0:57.0	Think of that moment when you're about to hit play on a YouTube video, and you think,
1:00.0	I'm just going to watch this one, then I'm out and that'll be it.
1:04.0	When you hit play inside of YouTube server it wakes up this avatar voodoo doll version of
1:09.8	you based on all your click patterns and everyone else's click patterns that are kind of like the nail filings and hair clippings and everyone else's near filings and hair clippings.
1:17.5	So this voodoo doll starts to look and act just like you.
1:20.5	And then they test, like they throw in all these little video darts at you and see if I test these
1:25.7	100 million darts which video is most likely to keep you here so now in this case
1:30.5	YouTube isn't trying to harm you when it outcompetes your self-control.
1:34.4	In fact, it's trying to meet you at the perfect thing that would keep you here next.
	...

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