I’m not sure about users definitely preferring the existing recommendations to random ones—I actually have been trying to turn off YouTube recommendations because they make me spend more time on YouTube than I want. Meanwhile other recommendation systems send me news that is worse on average than the rest of the news I consume (from different channels). So in some cases at least, we could use a very minimal standard of: a system is aligned if the user better off because the recommendation system exists at all.
This is a pretty blunt metric, and probably we want something more nuanced, but at least to start off with it’d be interesting to think about how to improve whichever recommender systems are currently not aligned.
I’m not sure about users definitely preferring the existing recommendations to random ones—I actually have been trying to turn off YouTube recommendations because they make me spend more time on YouTube than I want. Meanwhile other recommendation systems send me news that is worse on average than the rest of the news I consume (from different channels). So in some cases at least, we could use a very minimal standard of: a system is aligned if the user better off because the recommendation system exists at all.
This is a pretty blunt metric, and probably we want something more nuanced, but at least to start off with it’d be interesting to think about how to improve whichever recommender systems are currently not aligned.