Corporations are starting to win the battle to control and restrict us. What can we do?

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Over the past week I’ve noticed a couple of very worrying trends stemming from advancements in tech and AI.

1 - a friend of mine was banned from Tinder because he politely rejected a cat fish. He’s now banned from every dating site own by Match (90% of the market). Getting round this ban is getting harder and harder due to how much information they have on you (Device ID, IP address, personal details, and even face recognition). His dating life is now 90% harder due to no fault of his own.

2 - YouTube Premium crackdown. As has been widely discussed here, the crooks at Google are investing millions into software to stop you paying a fair price for the service. I haven’t seen anyone come up with a solution to this yet.

I’m sure there are many more examples where powerful corporations are starting to take advantage of AI to restrict our ability to a fair service.

What we can do about it? Can we, the general public, realistically keep up with it and come up with ways round these systems as we have done so far?

I fear that AI, with its unlimited potential, is going to tip the scale toward these greedy and controlling organisations to the point where we have no recourse. The two examples above may seem trivial, but where does it stop?

CBDCs are being ruled out for now, but future governments may start introducing them while phasing out physical cash, completely restricting and controlling our every purchase.

Our cars will be limited and tracked so that every minor infringement will be monitored and penalised.

Our freedom is slowly being diminished and it isn’t solely in the name of crime reduction or national security. It’s to further profit from us to enrich the elite and powerful and to ultimately further increase their control over us common people.

The future is bleak, I fear. I’m glad I was born in a generation where we enjoyed freedom for a significant portion of our lives. I am fearful for my future children and their children.

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Well this is the first I’ve heard of “Big Dating”

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Sorry, but I flat out refuse to believe that your friend got banned for “politely rejecting” someone. That literally just doesn’t happen, there must be a bigger reason.

That single first point makes your entire post look like you standing up to your “friend” and trying to move the blame elsewhere instead of admitting his blame

4

Your definition of “Freedom” is very different than mine. First I will never believe that your friend got a complete ban for politely declining a cat fish. Nonsense. More likely he deserves the ban.

Your ability to abuse a service is not “freedom”. Your freedom lies in your ability to use another service. Not to decide what fair is an be under the delusion that you are now somehow morally clean.

My fear for my children is that they will grow up with your children that are taught that any flimsy excuse is justification for their illegal actions and that this is somehow their “freedom”.

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  1. highly doubt, I’m willing to bet there is more to this story.

  2. Whilst I agree this is upsetting (it affects me too). Paying in another region is technically against their terms of service.
    You don’t walk into a local supermarket and expect to pay the same price for milk as someone in a different country. It’s the same thing, the service costs different prices in different areas due to the cost of providing the service + local earnings etc.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t massively over charging, the prices are highway robbery, but it makes sense that even a fair price would be different in different areas.

This crack down was always going to happen eventually and like I said, while it’s upsetting, it’s not surprising.

It’s also hardly restricting your freedoms… You are free to pay the price they charge locally. And you also do not gain or lose any freedom based on using YouTube premium or not.

Its also not an AI thing. All they need to do is look at the IP address you signed up from and see if it’s ever used again. Its pretty easy to tell when someone that paid in Ukraine is then exclusively using the service from the US. So far I’ve mitigated it by just every now and then connecting from my Ukraine VPN… I’m probably living on borrowed time though and that may just be placebo.

As for what you can do? You can lobby for privacy laws that protect you. Don’t want to be tracked in your car? Get involved and make sure there are laws protecting you. Look up your local government and tell them what’s important to you.

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I do not consider cheating on Google part of freedom rights, I do not disagree 100% that it is ethical but it is part of a different debate whether their pricing is fair or not.

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AI absolutely does NOT have unlimited potential. It doesn’t exist. It is purely in the realm of science fiction. All we have is databases that take out what we say/ask and spit out what the database has ranked as most likely to be what you’re looking for. It’s essentially just an upscaled version of the word suggestion/prediction feature cellphones have when you’re typing.

And we’re almost certainly never going to see true AI. What we have now is so resource intensive the way it is that it’s not sustainable long term, and true AI would be miles worse in terms of sustainability. And with climate change being as bad as it is and progressing as fast as it is, we’re looking at major changes to the world’s landscape and the amount of life on the planet and the availability of resources becoming too slim for any real development of AI to ever really happen.

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They’ve probably done him a favour to be fair but in principle what they’ve done is pretty shocking, it’s like banning someone from going outside :joy:

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It absolutely does happen sir, there are countless examples online where people are saying the same thing - are they bothering to go online and pretend they didn’t do anything?

Think of this way. Tinder gets in huge trouble when it messes up and fails to ban serious offenders. The NZ tinder murder case is a prime example. They were warned the guy was bad news and didn’t ban him, then he went on to murder a future date.

So what does Tinder do about this? Auto-ban whenever a serious allegation is made. Do they care if it’s false? No. Incorrectly banning someone is far less damaging than the alternative. Do they want to spend millions investigating the accusations? No, of course not.

If you want to test this out, go ahead and ask a friend to find your account and get them to report it for some sort of sexual assault - you will be banned without question. And your appeal will be rejected within 5 minutes.

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None of those things you mentioned are restricting my freedom though, I don’t really mind if my data is being used to try and sell me stuff online - I am not that easily manipulated. Likewise with social media apps trying to steal your time, I know it’s happening and I can control it.

My issue is with the things that you cannot control. That’s where we seem to be heading. The tide is changing.

11

As someone who’s actually studied Machine Learning, that’s simply not true. Sure, current AI models are just trained off user data, but that doesn’t just make it a “database” simply suggesting the next most likely word. ML is able to detect highly complex relationships between data structures, even moreso that us humans can, since some neural networks can be so complex that they become impossible to analyze or understand by a human being.

A great example is, you guessed it, ChatGPT. It is not simply a “word suggester”, it’s a Large Language Model, which is just the fancy way to say that it can parse and “understand” human languages. When you “ask” it something in english, it can “understand” what you asked and will output a reasonable (enough) answer. ChatGPT excels as a programming assistant, and every programmer’s workflow completely changed almost instantly when tools such as GPT4 and Copilot where introduced.

At this point, if you aren’t using either on the daily as a programmer, you’re simply not a good programmer for using the tools available to you to boost your productivity.