Discussion

Kleefeld on Comics: Amazon AI Cancelling Webcomics

stingraycharles: > The suddenness with which his and my accounts were canceled, coupled with the complete lack of any sort of appeals process, leads me to believe this is the result of Amazon turning over their account review process to AI.So all this is speculation.> Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright. I'm not sure what the thinking was on their part.The speculation is getting strangely specific…> In theory, with something like this, you would have tested the process by simply running a report before doing anything to actually impact any accounts. But if they did that, they would've gotten tons of obviously false positivesBut we don’t know anything about what happened, this is based on a hypothesis, speculating on the mistakes made, and how it should have been done, etc.> 3. They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but said, "We're the 800 pound gorilla in the room here. F--- them!" and rolled the AI agent into production anyway.> Obviously, I have no particular insight into Amazon's inner workings, but I'm inclined to think it was the last of these options.Now you’re even suggesting that the players here are being malignant, and no you don’t have insights in the inner workings.We can speculate all we want about these things, but we don’t even know whether this is related to AI, other than “it happened recently and AI also happened recently”. Yes, it’s plausible, but making any claims more specific inner workings of Amazon and what mistakes were made, never mind suggesting what they should have done otherwise, is just reaching and needs a huge disclaimer.

rpdillon: Excellent breakdown. The title seems misleading since we don't even know it's AI. I very much dislike when folks state speculation as fact.> Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright.

girvo: With how powerful these companies are and the enormous impact on your real world life them capriciously deciding to cancel your account can have, governments need to step in. Good idea to write to my federal member here to be honest, I think there is some appetite for reigning in abuses of power of these tech monopolies where I live.

Rekindle8090: I'm sure AWS is horrified

renewiltord: HN titles sound so authoritative and then it turns out they’re built on a house of cards. Here is a piece I authored in that vein:Sun Found To Have LifeEnergy is required for life and the Sun has lots of energy. Life creates lots of movement and the Sun has movement. The coronal mass ejections that fall back look like whales. Anyway, I don’t know anything about the Sun or anything but if this is true it means a lot for the way we think about life.

Eisenstein: You are absolutely correct in everything you say. However, assumptions are usually correct, and past behavior is a good indication for present behavior.

xatax: Post hoc ergo propter hoc strikes again