Seonglae ChoEven if technology advances, meaningful user alignment is impossible if the incentives of the party deploying it are misaligned.
Here’s an example of an “aligned recommender system” I encountered on a job-search site. The system was designed not merely to maximize views, but to recommend jobs the user would realistically apply to and get hired for, so the system’s “success” (the user leaving the site because they found a job) actually matched the business goal. In contrast, dating apps face a structural contradiction: when a user finds genuine love and deletes the app, the company loses a paying customer, which makes alignment with users much harder.
The Surprising Power and Complexity of Aligned Recommendations
In which a naive algorithm turns out to be profound, dating apps are structurally incapable of love, and the author waxes rhapsodic about the lovely Brenda.
https://davegriffith.substack.com/p/the-surprising-power-and-complexity
