this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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It's a little deeper than that, a lot of advertising works on engagement -based heuristics. Today, most people would call it "AI" but it's fundamentally just a reinforcement learning network that trains itself constantly on user interactions. It's difficult-to-impossible to determine why input X is associated with output Y, but we can measure in aggregate how subtle changes propagate across engagement metrics.
It is absolutely truthful to say we don't know how a modern reinforcement learning network got to the state it's in today, because transactions on the network usually aren't journaled, just periodically snapshot for A/B testing.
To be clear, that's not an excuse for undesirable heuristic behavior. Somebody somewhere made the choice to do this, and they should be liable for the output of their code.
It's not deeper than "we know how they work" which was the point I was making. I admit I gave am oversimplified layman's explanation but it is not deeper than that.