My Covid Eating Habits as a Youtube Paper Clip Problem.

I like cooking or that’s at least what people like to circulate about me. YouTube thinks the same. Before Covid I wasn’t watching cooking videos that much. I didn’t know a lot about the FoodTube and neither was I watching that much of YouTube. At most, it was for me another form of entertainment. Today, I would say that I am addicted to YouTube. My hands have learned to open a new window, write ‘y’, ‘o’, ‘u’ and press “Enter” that fast, that it surely is a subliminal practice, which probably allows me to get distracted whenever I meet a difficulty. I realized this when I installed a program that would forbid me from entering YouTube. In the end I removed it, as I was using another browser to get to it.

And in the beginning this was wonderful. I searched really cool music and I watched interviews from really important scholars. But slowly I got hooked up again and I watched FoodTube or a Werner Herzog/Nassim Taleb interview, quality material one can argue, but it doesn’t matter: they are all part of the YouTube addiction feedback loop. This is the answer to someone saying: “people used to watch television, YouTube is another form of it”. Yeah, but this is a bit smarter: there are areas in the YouTube graph that are sinks, like black holes of a semantic structure, from which it’s really difficult to escape. The reason is simple: if you search really cool (rare and interesting) music, it is highly unlike that YouTube will propose to you another type of cool music again. It’s wire-heading, will gradually bring to you something mainstream and addictive. After all who cares about spending quality computation for the masses. It’s much simpler to influence people than to understand and help them bloom. For example if I watch a video about Michel Serres, it is really unlikely that I will receive him again on my feed, and even if I receive him and not click at him (because maybe I am not in the mood of watching this today - this is what liberty of education is right?) forget about it. But if instead, I watch a lecture of Nassim Taleb, I will get him on my feed all of the time. And I will click on him of course. But my point is, that what you click is not necessarily something you like seeing all them time, but something that is addictive. Actually I would argue that the whole large scale social experiment of YouTube is about learning how to turn people to normal addicts of normal products, i.e. building a consumer culture.

How I got addicted

I realized, that I had an addiction to YouTube, before I saw this shallow but important movie “Social Dilemma”. The origin of my addiction was simple. It started during Covid, confined with a ton of work (Master + Projects + …). So much (mental) work that I didn’t had the time to entertain myself in any other way. Some days I would consecutively work for 16 hours straight. I literally would wake up, open my laptop and close it to sleep, having tiny breaks to eat simple things. Plus, I was living in a CROUS residence: a really affordable student residence that the French government provides to some students, which is quite nice, but a “student camp” nevertheless (at least with the confinement it felt a bit like that).

Yes, some times it is really satisfying to work that much, but after a point when you realize that you are part of train that needs you as a fuel to move forward, it’s horrible. Also my brain started to develop a need for “something that is not work”: social interaction it is, watching memes it is, eating it is, you name it. This cognitive resistance, gave me the idea that we could maybe even argue biologically about leisure. I now strongly believe that as sleep is really important to organize our thoughts and make us more productive, the same is the case for the non-productive hours for our creativity. I felt that all my creativity was strained after a lot consecutive days of constant work that I had to do. In other words: I felt a slave. I also got separated from a person I loved a lot (while we lived in different countries) and this made things even harder. Having both my side-hustle and a very competitive degree to perform to, I didn’t have another choice; and at least my work kept me walking.

Moreover, Covid isolation felt a bit like this black mirror episode (San Junipero) with these two women who fall in love, but who both are living in a comma-situation inside an asylum for the elderly, but a bit grimmer as I didn’t make any new relationship in any form, although I made toxic (spectacle based) dreams that managed to unclog my dampened soul as “Tuboflo”.

Yes I spoke a lot about myself, but just to give you a context. Nobody get’s addicted to something without a reason. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that the addictive entity is the cause of all evil. Sometimes our own problems just pile up and exactly because we are addicted to something to distract ourselves, we can’t move forward. But anyway, you are not here to hear me play the role of Gabor Mate (another brilliant person I discovered through YouTube).

Yes, one could also ask the question “what happens when what is addictive is what makes you appreciate things about life?” A system of addiction is much more than an addiction I would answer, but again yes, I have a more interesting story to tell; one more related to my discipline.

The Paper Clip Problem

You may have heard about this problem. I actually learned it from Nick Bostrom (from his Google Talk on Super Intelligence, that I watched on YouTube). The idea is that an intelligent agent has been programmed to maximize the amount of paper clips it collects. In the end, after it has used all the available steel it starts destroying humans in order to extract from them the materials need to make paperclips. What is interesting in this dystopic scenario, is that although the agent is super smart (as it finds a way of using humans to make paper clips), what it is trying to maximize is as silly as likes (or view-time).

In general machine learning works by maximizing objectives. These objectives are in fact often really simple: we can understand them as paperclips themselves. Actually the objective of YouTube is simple. Increase and well distribute the views, the channel subscription, the view time (you name it). The idea is that by learning on simple objectives, you supposedly learn “good features” for human behavior and you can more effectively run ads at scale (remember this can restrict our model from becoming “really smart”). But YouTube is effectively an RL-system which tries to also influence you towards an ad instead of just recording and analyze your behavior.

Without diving into the necessary discussion on whether an asymmetric (as it processes your information by the information it already has for all other people) large scale computational social entity can enforce it’s predictive behavior on you, basically turning you into a normative category (something that I would call “computational peer pressure”), let’s approach the YouTube paper clip problem in a more naïve way:

One day you click on a proposed video (disobeying Jerome Lanier’s advice) of an Italian recipe of “Aglio and Olio” from the addictive Italian-British cook Gennaro Contaldo. Next, you click on a proposed video by Vice Munchies about something cool in Italy. Next, you click on a video about fried chicken. This is the end. Fried chicken is that an addictive form of content (see the visibility of Zack Choi’s Muckbang channel for example) that the addiction of other people will multiply the relevancy of such a topic as a proposed one. It depends on how youtube categorizes your “taste” but long-story short what is going to happen is that if you click on a “fried chicken” video, you will have it on your feed forever. This was the case for me: I was waking up every morning and either opening YouTube or even my Google feed (part of the news feed of my Android Phone) I would get a proposal in the category of “fried chicken” to either read or watch.

I never expected that I would so clearly witness a case where artificial intelligence is that pervasive. Imagine how it would be if someone posted new “ads” all over your place every morning and some of them where always pictures of juicy fried chicken. The relationship we have with our mobiles is a bit intimate after all and thus they are our home. I also started making fried chicken after a point, while at the same time I was skeptical of why I was gaining weight. I should also add to this that a lot of people I known of, that watch FoodTube, have started using much more butter for example in their cooking and/or get weight because the eat much more. Butter makes the food much tastier and also it makes it much more visually appealing (as it “thickens the sauce” or forms a “brown crust”), creating an expectation that it would fill (could because I highly skeptical of what is the percentage of recipes that people see on FoodTube that the actually try to recreate).

If we also factor in the effect of the COVID-confinement to my physical exercise, this was destructive for my shape. I watched lots of recipes per day to “clean up my mind” (without ever cooking a single of them) and I also had the feeling that I can entertain myself at home, without this forcing me to even have a walk or go out for whatever reason. I got more that ten kilos and I felt that I was part of paperclip problem: YouTube was maximizing it’s objective (a simple one) and as a result the algorithm was using “any resource it had available to produce it’s paper clips (i.e. increase it’s views)”.

What this actually means: YouTube was seducing me all day with pictures of food (imagine again seeing all day posters of delicious food whenever you try to relax for a moment) and other content in order to stay on the platform and as I was susceptible to it, I got hooked to it and served it. It also became my main platform for any form education or entertainment: from new films and film-makers, to scholars or to politicians. In turn, this made me question all the things that I admired watching on this platform from political figures (like AOC) to philosophers (like Zizek), due to their addictive meme like character.

I decided to write this article to expose my situation and challenge you to look deeper into YouTube’s addictive aspect and most importantly to acknowledge that you are potentially part of its paperclip problem. Some people also refer to it as YouTube radicalizing aspect, but although I find this term to be accurate in certain regards, I find that it comes from an ideological standpoint of the balanced/civilized academic. (We are living in a fucking social jungle (even in terms of desires), thus does YouTube facilitate it’s emergence or produce it? - I think it does both of course, but the rigorousness required to address this, becomes gatekeeping from non-academic studies and approaches.)

Dumber Platforms is all you need.

Searching for a solution, someone would suggest to enrich the YouTube System with better objectives. Actually it’s really difficult for now to evaluate what “quality time” is: To argue that, I should tell that there are really important things in my life which have had a very deep influence in me and which I would watched only once (or twice) and never revisited for years. It is thus significantly difficult for a platform to understand such types of connections from your current data-trails. And in what context would they have any incentive to enforce them?

Actually ads, that such platforms are funded from and base their business models on, try to sell a commodity. The idea that a good product means good quality time, “because these are the products that survive in the long run” is basically one that sees the history of a commodity as something predictable. A commodity passionately waits to be sold to be reproduced through capital (money invested in more people, more computing power, more data, more IP, more whatever). It is afraid to die and puts pressure on you to buy it. The pressure of it’s investment or even the anxiety of it’s creators of “observing/appreciating their novelty”.

Even if we ignore incentive and follow the “scientific fantasy/fallacy” of attempting to observe someone independently (without influencing them) and identifying “quality-time” by observing in real-time their organism through an AI microscope (the neuralink kind of approach), the information and computing-resources which we would need to record and analyze how someone actually feels, would make us (the noble people) wonder: “Is it really the goal of science to surveil humans just for the purpose of good predictions?”. Nothing can be more pervasive to the human subject than truth itself. As a “détourned” idea of Herzog: “If you shine lights to all parts of the human mind, then this mind becomes uninhabitable.”

Thus until I am proven wrong, I think we should demand more dumber platforms or at least platforms that don’t use interactive learning (like R.L.), acknowledging that they may perform a bit worse (on some tasks) and provide us a bit less pleasure, but “it’s ok”!