The ‘Brand Safety’ and ‘Suitability’ industries have financially crushed the news business by keeping ads away from articles that its ‘sentiment analysis’ algorithms think will make people sad or upset.

  • PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s a new one to me, I’ve never heard of sentiment analysis. This makes sense, they want control of your emotions and the ones that help their products. I bet they focus just on negging and jealousy inducing things. Sad and upset doesn’t sell shit.

    • psmgx@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Sentiment analysis is basic data mining.

      Get access to an API and scan the tweets / posts / whatever and look for key words. Hate, dumb, wtf, love, awesome, etc. You can get 60-80% accuracy just counting the number of words that express a sentiment. Literally that simple, just count positive and negative words/phrases. Across a large dataset you can get a decent idea what people think, and there are easy ways to dig deeper.

      And that was the half-assed quick approach, folks who know Markov chains and LLMs could do far, far deeper analysis.

      • PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Our world is breaking and we don’t know how to fix it, but we can guess pretty accurately how people feel about it. Turn AI onto fixing our problems people who make the robots.

    • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The title sounds like BS to me. By that logic Facebook should not have any ads, since it’s mostly rage porn that upsets users and therefore will be shared most often.