Tag: american
Startup develops AI that makes call center employees sound like white, American robots
Silicon Valley startups sometimes seem like they’ve made it their goal to come up with the most dystopian uses of Artificial Intelligence. Earlier this month we had Meta’s racist chatbot and the AI-generated rapper that uses the n-word, before that, back in June, we learned about the Google AI so good it convinced an engineer it was sentient. This time around, Palo Alto-based startup Sanas has introduced to the world an AI with the goal of making foreign call center employees sound accent-neutral, and the effect of making them sound white.
As reported by SFGATE, Sanas is a startup that offers “accent translation” for call center employees, a job that tends to be outsourced to cheaper foreign markets like India and the Philippines. Sanas, which was founded by three Stanford graduates, offers a real-time accent translation service, supposedly to make it easier for call center employees to be understood. It has already received over $30 million in venture capital funding.
“We don’t want to say that accents are a problem because you have one,” Sanas president Marty Sarim told SFGATE. “They’re only a problem because they cause bias and they cause misunderstandings.”
Based on the demo you can try out on Sanas’ website where you can “hear the magic,” it really does work. Not only does the software remove the accent, but it replaces the voice with something unsettlingly robotic akin to a standard American English accent. According to its website, Sanas believes this will allow call center employees to “take back the power of their own voice.”
A common comparison to Sanas’ AI has been to the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You where the main character, a Black man, adopts a “white voice” in order to garner more sales at his dystopian call center job. While Sanas states that its AI is meant to combat bias, critics assert that “accent translation” is another way to dehumanize an already dehumanizing job.
“On the surface it reflects communication difficulty — people not being able to understand someone else’s speech,” Winifred Poster, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis told SFGATE. “But, really, it’s coded for a whole bunch of other issues about how accent triggers racism and ethnocentrism.”
The Sanas AI not sounding human doesn’t help much either. According to the University of Toronto’s Kiran Mirchandani, whose research was on the treatment of Indian call center employees, she told SFGATE that people who are already predisposed to dishing out racist abuse to call center employees also won’t take kindly to a robotic voice on the phone either.
“Customer racism is likely to increase if workers are further dehumanized when an ‘app’ is placed between worker and customer, especially since there will no doubt be errors made by the app,” she told SFGATE.
Sanas’ president Sarim stressed in his interview with SFGATE that workers will have a choice about whether or not to use the AI’s accent translation. However, those familiar with the exploitation that happens within the foreign call center industry believe if the tech proves to be successful, the workers won’t have much of a choice.
“There is virtually nothing in the labor process of call centers which involves choice by the workers in terms of technology,” Poster told SFGATE. Already, workers are subject to deeply invasive surveillance, which makes it almost impossible to have an authentic conversation with people on the other end.”
Grace Kinstler Weight Loss Surgery & Secret To American Idol’s Hips!
Star American Professor Masterminded a Surveillance Machine For Chinese Big Tech
Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor’s research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha’s lab to research military applications of AI technologies. But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha’s research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha’s research team. In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha’s team pledged to “work closely with Alibaba researchers” to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as “aggressive,” “shy,” “impulsive,” and other personalities. The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba. The software’s “clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled,” Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. “Given what we know now about China’s architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it.”
It’s not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor’s expertise. In January 2019 — back when the Alibaba grant was still active — Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team. The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled “large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds.” Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into “efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds.” Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant. There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises “serious questions about ethics in machine learning research,” Fedasiuk said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Devil is a landlord who gets what he deserves in this South American comics anthology
The Lizard Prince and Other South American Tales brings a modern spin to centuries of myth.
A YouTuber just uncovered lost footage of the American Sailor Moon
The decades-long search for the American version of Sailor Moon has finally come to an end. Ray Mona, a YouTuber who documents her efforts to find lost media (including the never-released Mean Girls game), has managed to unearth the pilot episode of the unaired, never-finished series that the Sailor Moon fandom has come to know as Saban Moon.
The story of the Americanized Sailor Moon starts in 1993, about two years before the debut of the dubbed Sailor Moon that we know today. At the time, animation studio Toon Makers teamed up with Renaissance Atlantic Entertainment, the producers behind the original Power Rangers, in a bid to make an English version of the series. The two companies pitched a project that blends live-action with…
Bioshock Infinite Turns American Religious History Into A Nonsensical Nightmare
BioShock is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, August 21, 2022. Below, we take a look at how the religious commentary in its sequel, BioShock Infinite, lacks the sharpness it needs to resonate.
Playing BioShock Infinite at launch, several things stuck in my mind as a young Mormon. Zachary Hale Comstock, the game’s principal villain and cult leader, is a kind of Brigham Young: a fiery prophet, claiming visions and prophecies while he grasps at power. His floating metropolis of Columbia is a kind of Salt Lake City: a grim capital on the cloud, both a refuge and a prison. Though the game is drawing on a melting pot of historical and fictional inspirations, these parallels have kicked around in my mind for nearly 10 years. Creative director Ken Levine even named Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as inspirations for Comstock in an interview back in 2013. To the game’s credit, these are touchstones rather than full-on parallels. In turn, though, the depiction of Comstock and his religion lacks precision: Rather than haunting resemblance, it plays as frivolous caricature. It is that flatness that fuels the game’s best-remembered false equivalences between the revolutionary Vox Populi and the white sepulchers of Comstock’s floating city.
Part of that caricature is the game’s reluctance to clarify Comstock’s particular theology. We can infer that Comstock’s religion (which never gets a denominational title) believes in modern miracles, as Comstock claims to have spoken to an angel and produced a miracle child. It practices baptism by immersion. White supremacy and racism are woven into every aspect of its doctrine. It uplifts the founding fathers to the level of sainthood. Besides these basic traits, there is no context for Comstock’s religion. There are no adjacent movements or sects. Though Comstock’s journey to become a prophet began with a baptism, the game never makes clear what group he entered. This lack of specificity unties Comstock from any particular historical moment. BioShock Infinite seems to draw more from the conservative Tea Party movement–which, though politically focused, had a devotional character–more than any specific religious group, especially from the time period.
NASA’s Nicole Aunapu Mann will be the first Native American woman to visit space
NASA is breaking new ground for astronauts. As Indian Country Todayreports, the agency recently confirmed that Marine Corps Col. Nicole Aunapu Mann will be the first Native American woman to travel to space. The Wailacki tribe member will serve as the mission commander for the SpaceX-powered Crew-5 mission heading to the International Space Station as soon as September 29th. When she arrives, Mann will be ISS Expedition 68’s flight engineer during a six-month stay.
The Crew-5 mission will also ferry NASA’s Josh Cassada, Japan’s Koichi Wakata and Russia’s Anna Kikina to the ISS. Chickasaw Nation member John Herrington was the first Native American of any gender to visit space, flying aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2002.
Mann has a background well-suited to spaceflight. She started her career as a Navy aviator and has flown the F/A-18 Hornet while supporting missions operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. She also earned her master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford. NASA chose Mann as one of eight astronaut candidates in 2013. That group has since become influential, producing influential figures like Anne McClain, Jessica Meir and Crew Dragon pilot Victor Glover. Some of them, including Mann, have made NASA’s shortlist for the first crewed Artemis missions to the Moon.
For Mann, this first spaceflight isn’t just historic. In her interview with ICT, she saw the trip as smashing “barriers” for Native American children who didn’t think they could become astronauts. It won’t be surprising if more follow her before long.
How to watch American Netflix in the UK
Lining up all your favourite snacks and drinks, surrounding yourself with cushions and blankets, and then spending hours in front of a screen can be a truly therapeutic experience, but there is one big problem with this hobby: There is a limited amount of content out there to keep you satisfied.
Regular streamers can quickly get to a point when it feels like there’s nothing left to watch, and what are you supposed to do then? Don’t panic, because there is a simple solution to this problem.
If you’ve reached this point of saturation, you should consider investing in a VPN.
What is a VPN?
VPNs are security tools that provide protection for your information by creating a private network that hides your real IP address. All of your activity is untraceable and secure, because all of your online traffic passes through an encrypted tunnel. Nobody can see into the tunnel, and everything inside the tunnel is protected against online threats like hackers, viruses, and malware.
The act of hiding your real IP address is what can trick leading streaming sites into thinking you are based in another country.
What are the benefits of using a VPN?
First and foremost, VPNs are used to provide protection for your sensitive information. This is obviously important, but there’s another reason that VPNs are so popular. These tools can be also be used to watch content that is normally blocked in your location.
By hiding your real IP address and connecting you to a server in another country, you can watch all your favourite content from that location. For example, you could watch all the extra films and shows on American Netflix that are not usually accessible outside of the U.S. There is so much content out there that can be accessed with the help of a VPN.
We’re all in need of something that can bypass geo-restrictions to access all of this blocked entertainment, and that something is a VPN. These services are kind of like keys to the online world, granting you access to more of the shows and films you love.
How do you unblock American Netflix with a VPN?
If you think accessing American Netflix is going to be tricky with a VPN, think again. It’s actually a really simple process that absolutely everyone can understand.
All you need to do is open up your preferred VPN, select an American server in order to spoof your IP to a U.S. address, and then head to Netflix. This quick and easy action makes Netflix think you’re in the U.S. when you’re actually in the UK, so you can watch all that great content that is normally unavailable. Not too complicated, right?
If you’re worried that this whole thing sounds a bit illegal, then maybe we can reassure you. It’s currently legal to watch Netflix while using a VPN, although we should point out that Netflix states in its terms of service that it may restrict your account without compensation or notice if you are engaged in “improper” use. We’re not entirely sure what that means, but consider yourself warned.
We should make it very clear that you still need to be subscribed to Netflix for this trick to work. A VPN is not going to grant access to the streaming site for free. A VPN provides access to more libraries from around the world, once you’re subscribed.
What is the best VPN for watching Netflix?
There are a lot of VPN services out there that can effectively unblock American Netflix, but which is the best? There are plenty of strong options for you to consider, but we wouldn’t want you wasting your time checking everything out. To save you time, we’ve handpicked your best options. Each service has a different set of features that will suit some users better than others, and it’s all about finding something that works for you.
It’s tough to pick the best VPN for accessing American Netflix, but ExpressVPN does stand out from the competition for a number of reasons. It has a streaming-friendly interface, security focused features, and strong connection speeds. All of this provides users with a straightforward and speedy streaming experience. Speed is probably the most important feature to consider when it comes to picking a VPN for streaming. Using a VPN to connect to another country often affects your download speed, which can be devastating when you are trying to binge on your favourite show. We found that using ExpressVPN consistently results in the lowest buffering time when streaming Netflix in 4K. It is however a little pricey.
ExpressVPN is at the top of this list because it combines essential features with impressive results, but it isn’t the only option available to you. We have lined up all the best VPNs for unblocking Netflix, with something for everyone on this list. We’ve highlighted the best deals on the likes of Surfshark, PureVPN, CyberGhost VPN, NordVPN, and ZenMateVPN.
These are the best VPNs for Netflix in 2022.