[oefrha]

> If you were a Mercor contractor and you believe your voice may already be in circulation, ORAVYS will analyze the first three suspect samples free of charge.

Awesome, if you're a victim of an AI company having your voice, you can help yourself by sending another AI company your voice!

> Audio is never used to train commercial models without explicit consent

I'm sure Mercor has explicit consent as well, legal teams are reasonably good at legally covering their asses with license terms.

[saadn92]

The irony runs deeper than the free analysis offer. The whole Mercor contractor relationship was this exact pattern: hand over studio-quality voice recordings and ID scans to get paid for data labeling work that didn't require either. "Explicit consent" was buried in the terms, and people clicked through because they needed the paycheck.

Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

[inetknght]

> biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.

[eqvinox]

Reminds me of the Interrail data breach [https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/eurail-data-breach-3080...]

The fediverse take on that was "customers are advised to rotate their faces and birthdays."

[nikkaelle]

Vocal lessons are both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I haven't been using any voiceprint systems but I know most humans are unable to tell that my trained voice is the same physical person as my old voice. Would be curious to find out if an AI voiceprint system can discern whether it's the same or not.

[salad-tycoon]

You’ll really like this then, it’s a clip of Phil Hendrie who I recently discovered. He does tons of voices and sound effects, his studio has multiple microphone and switches between them for different speakers.

Here is a clip of him when someone called his studio thinking they were the local Pizza Hut. Phil does all the other voices, including the phone system.

https://share.google/QHNkgsOdvGj7tapfk

[wholinator2]

Are you talking about singing lessons, or actual talking training? Singing lessons helped me sing but didn't change the way i talked at all, but i was only able to afford them for a summer so maybe it takes more time than that

[lemming]

When I was in NYC a while back, I met a woman at a friend's dinner party. She sounded totally American, but was in fact Brazilian. She worked as a lawyer, and said that she'd had to get extensive voice training in order to sound American so that people would take her more seriously professionally. I have no idea if the professional part worked, but the accent, mannerisms etc was amazing - I would never have guessed.

[nikkaelle]

I'm referring to speaking, not singing. After a _lot_ of work, I can speak passably as a woman or man and switch freely between the two. Depending on context I generally choose just one for the entire conversation, as switching tends to cause whiplash in the listener (^_^).

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

I'm curious as to what prompted you to pursue this ability.

[numpad0]

Does the f0 change? Or is it like power distribution of harmonics change? Or is it something else?

[Mistletoe]

I always answer my likely spam calls in a weird high pitched fake voice just in case.

[thedrexster]

>> "My voice is my passport. Verify me."

Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

[alasdair_]

>Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.

[Romario77]

just take up smoking heavily

[argee]

Easier to inhale an undisclosed amount of helium before recording your password voice

[malfist]

I recommend sulfur hexafluoride for something harder to replicate. Nothing like making hackers risk their life to impersonate you

[alasdair_]

Or skip the half measures and go straight for the dioxygen diflouride.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

[toss1]

Excellent idea!

Do you need to calibrate it to be able to repeat it, and does that calibration change if you are at a different altitude and in different conditions, such as humidity?

Does merely changing altitude (or ambient pressure) change voice enough to be considered different by a recognition or synthesizing system?

[throwaway67743]

Despite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way.

[idiomaddict]

Do you have a source for that? I can tell with pretty good accuracy whether my students smoke from their voices (adult language learners, we take smoke breaks together and they have no reason to conceal it), and would be very surprised if I’m just that lucky and there’s nothing a person can pick up on acoustically.

[throwaway67743]

20 years of heavy smoking :)

Although it does seem to affect some people more than others for sure, I guess it depends how and what you're smoking.

[reaperducer]

Despite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way.

I guess you don't listen to Sinatra.

[ssl-3]

Or John Mellencamp, who repeatedly states in interviews that he likes what smoking does to his singing voice.

[9991]

Source: it came to me in a dream.

[coldtea]

There's this myth (that came to you in pop culture) that you end up sounding like Tom Waits.

In reality, some phlegm aside, their voice is still the same in any way that matters.

If you knew people who didn't smoke and started (not uncommon in the 80s and 90s, quite a few people I know started smoking in university, or after the stress of a first job, some even later), and also the inverse, you can trivially hear it for yourself.

[terbo]

Depends on what you're smoking

[HansHamster]

bacon!

[DANmode]

and mostly how.

[hkt]

Smoke 40 cigarettes a day, your voice will be unrecognisable in no time

[bonesss]

Also: it’s not just the first order smoking, respiratory issues, increased chance of illness, and chronic coughing can damage your voices presentation.

[anilakar]

Biometrics are "what you are", not "what you know" or "what you have".

Voice fingeprinting is essentially useless because it is easily recorded and reproduced.

[Sander_Marechal]

I have been telling people for years that biometrics (face, fingerprint, voice) is your username, not your password. But people are easily swayed by convenience.

[noosphr]

If your user name is tattooed on your forehead, yes.

[Sander_Marechal]

For all intents an purposes it is, especially face ID. Also, courts in most countries can compel you to provide biometrics. But many cannot compel you to reveal passwords.

[freedomben]

This is an important point with biometrics that most people don't realize. When I say that biometrics aren't good security, most people are perplexed because they have seen movies and such that are high-tech where iris scans or fingerprints are the pinnacle of security.

I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it.

Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.

[salad-tycoon]

The story I remember is French police units specifically launching focused investigation on the sudden explosion of crypto people / family members getting kidnapped and having a finger or more chopped off.

I did find your story from 2005 about a man having his finger chopped off once the thieves realized they would need his appendage every time in order to start the car2.

https://news.sky.com/story/french-police-investigating-serie...

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624943-600-finger-c...

[Marsymars]

> Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

The problem is that even if you know that, you still get bombarded by banking apps promising "biometrics are more secure than passwords, switch now!"

[echelon]

> Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

Voices aren't strong.

There just aren't that many unique characteristic parameters behind a voice - it's largely dictated by an evolutionary shared shared larynx and vocal tract. They aren't fingerprints.

The fact that human voice impersonation is not only widely possible but popular should give you an indication of this. Prosody, intonation, range, etc. - it's all flexible and can be learned and duplicated.

The signals are simple too, because we have to encode and decode them quickly. You may or may not be able to picture and rotate an apple tree in your head, but you can easily read this sentence in the voice of David Attenborough.

Moreover, you can easily fine tune a voice model to fit any other speaker. You can store the unique speaker embeddings in a very thin layer. Zero and few shot unseen sampling can even come close to full reproduction. You can measure this all quantitatively.

Voices are not, and never have been, fingerprints. They're just not that unique.

[senectus1]

I doubt 1% of the 40k will learn anything.

also this took me way too long to realize it had nothing to do with warhammer.

[tlb]

You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.

[post_below]

This comment is pure LLM.

I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.

[AlexeyBelov]

An LLM comment from an AI booster. How poetic.

[smcin]

What makes you think that comment is LLM?

[lynndotpy]

I think "CYA" is maybe a misleading or overflowery term.

In the idealized world, the legal system is meant to provide an accessible alternative to violence for reconciling disputes, but it's increasingly wielded as an impossibly kafkaesque system meant to maintain corporate power over individuals.

I think "CYA" is an overly-flowery term for the reality that they're blocking every avenue for legal recourse, while a variety of other avenues still exist for which adding friction requires the maintenance of expensive and ongoing costs (owning multiple residences, hiring security, etc.)

(To be clear, I am advocating for a more accessible and level legal system, not for UHC-style violence.)

[cholmdomsky]

I'm taking some college courses, and one of them explicitly suggests to keep maybe-not-okay communications off of email so that "you don't expose your company to risks of litigation."

Ah, I see. So, when discussing ways to ensure cuatomers cannot utilize our warranty process, I'll make sure to do so in ways that are not traceable and won't show up in discovery.

[toss1]

The general rule for email, text, and all other communications I've heard is: "Don't write anything that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing on the front page of the New York times."

Heard that first from a US mil commander who once ran for a minor political office like state rep.

[throwaway173738]

I’ve also been told to preface all of my written communications with “dear lawyers and the FDA” at a job. Not that we did anything illegal, but sometimes you catch yourself writing statements that would be really easy to misconstrue.

[skybrian]

The underlying reason is that employees don't always know what they're talking about, but their nonsense could be useful to the other side in a court case.

The bigger the company, the more speculation there is about stuff people don't actually understand.

[miki123211]

This is just companies fighting back against the ever-expanding powers of state surveillance.

Back when the relevant laws were written, most communications was oral and in-person, writing was reserved for the "important stuff". We now apply the laws that were designed for memos to messages on Slack, which are a lot like conversations than permanent documents.

[lovich]

The underlying reason is to break the law and not get caught. Let’s be real here.

[shermantanktop]

Did you go to high school? A sister of a friend of a friend says blah blah blah and everybody knows that yadda yadda. Same thing happens in big companies, especially among people who are out of the loop but wish they knew all the inside details. I see this all the time and sometimes it sounds like something that would be pretty damaging in a court case.

In other cases I have heard people who ought to know better speculating about “what if” they didn’t have to follow the letter of some corporate policy that was rooted in risk avoidance. Again, it looks bad but it doesn’t mean anything concrete (except that the person might have iffy judgment).

[lovich]

> Did you go to high school?

Hey, fuck you too buddy.

I said this based on my years of working at companies on projects specifically to do things like delete all data as soon as it was legally permissible so it could never come up in court again.

And most of my “let’s take this offline” chats have led to discussions around doing illegal shit.

Hell, I had one manager give me handwritten code on paper and instructions to commit it under my name. The code in question would cause sales to go through without the discounts presented to customers because the discount service was buggy and his metrics were based on successfully completed sales. Even threatened to fire me when I said no, and only backed down when I put the paper in my pocket and asked if he would like for anyone else outside the room to see it or if he would not use me as a fall guy.

If your employees “don’t know what they’re talking about” then either they are not representative of the companies views and have no power to enact illegal policies for the company, or they do and you don’t have controls. Trying to hide that shit by default means you don’t get the benefit of the doubt, like you are giving them.

[CPLX]

That’s not the underlying reason.

[cholmdomsky]

That makes a lot of sense to me, thank you. I was probably projecting a lot of my own fears and feelings into the interpretation of a lot of what some of my courses are trying to teach me.

[sophacles]

> In the idealized world, the legal system is meant to provide an accessible alternative to violence for reconciling disputes, but it's increasingly wielded as an impossibly kafkaesque system meant to maintain corporate power over individuals.

This is an overly flowery way of saying: violence.

The worst of the consequences are the same. People end up dead, destitute, and/or with long-term health consequences and are unable to enjoy the fruits labor in the worst cases. In the milder cases i think i'd prefer a bruise for a week to a huge financial loss.

[traverseda]

There are plenty of nonviolent extralegal options. Ranging fron sit-ins and protests, to destruction of property, to many examples in the CIA's subtle sabotage field guide like running meetings poorly.

[sli]

They're saying due to the real world effects, the current system isn't meaningfully different from violence. They aren't advocating for violence in turn.

[caminante]

Per the WSJ article last week, I suspect Mercor's playing in a grey area of contracts. It wasn't just voice.[0]

A lot of people were basically wiretapping themselves AND their businesses!

While a lot of Mercor "contractors" claim Mercor over-reached with data gathering via Insightful, it's kind of smart because people are too afraid to complain too much knowing they'll not only lose their primary job, but also open themselves up to uncapped liability for willful misconduct.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mercor-ai-startup-personal-data-...

[a012]

Reminds me of my experience when trying to remove my Airbnb account, they require my ID card scans of both sides. I said fuck it and never touch this company again

[zelphirkalt]

Quickly, extract some more money from this customer and hold their data hostage!

[sidewndr46]

This reminds me of those identity theft settlements, where you need to prove your identity to claim the reward

[Henchman21]

Has your identity been stolen? Try our free credit monitoring for a month!

Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

[zkmon]

> Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

Most tech solutions are built on the problems they created. This includes phones, cars, computers, every software upgrade, and almost every electronic gadget. You are forced to use them because the world around you is no longer compatible with the way of life that was before the introduction of these tech.

[danlitt]

I probably agree with you but what on earth are phones and cars doing in this list? They solve obvious physical problems not caused by a company.

[itintheory]

My interpretation would be that cars are necessary to live in places where urban design assumes that we'll use cars to get around. Many cities are designed this way.

Similarly, phones are required now for some activities, like online banking. First it was an option, then it became the norm.

[zkmon]

Exactly.

[nix0n]

General Motors contributed significantly to the decline of passenger rail in the USA.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

[Henchman21]

I’ve spent some time thinking about this. I’ve basically decided this is nonsense. Please give me the problem that the following both created and solved: phones, cars, computers.

In my view the problems of “communication over distances”, “quickly traveling over distances” and “having information to process” all existed as problems well before we invented these solutions.

So that leaves only the idea that we’re forced to use these tool because the world has changed. That is frequently true but hinges on the amount of effort an individual is willing to make - and their economic prowess in an economy that rewards groupthink.

I stand by my original statement: selling solutions to problems you created ought to be illegal.

[hedora]

This would eliminate the credit report, monitoring and fixing industry, which would be a good thing.

Court records are public in the US. If creditors want to know if you’ve been in financial trouble, they should check for bankruptcies and lawsuits, not the extrajudicial version of those that the credit reporting companies run based on hearsay.

[sokoloff]

Credit reporting is better in some ways than alternative systems of “vouching” for someone.

It’s not better in all ways, of course, but the alternative is not “everyone gets cheap credit extended to them” but rather “people who rich people know and trust get cheap credit extended to them, some others get more expensive credit, and some get no credit extended”. It’s not obvious to me that that’s better.

[hedora]

We definitely are already in the second regime. The credit rating industry just makes sure the bottom 99% of the decision making also happens in secret.

[sokoloff]

I come from purely middle-class roots (100% blue collar grandparents and public school teacher parents).

I got a lot of inexpensive credit extended to me throughout my life, without any rich people knowing me from Adam.

[Oravys]

Hi oefrha. I totally understand your point of view. The only thing is: we give you an opportunity to recognize how unique your voice actually is. We only analyze the audio file to show you how much uniqueness a voice carries. Audio is never used for training without explicit consent and is purged on a defined retention schedule. That is very important to us and also to let people know what their voice has to offer them for their growth and self awareness. Big difference wiTh what Mercor did.

[aitchnyu]

I remember an AI dataset tool asking candidates to record a 1 minute self intro video for interview purposes in 2022. I was wondering if they were manually watching all of them.

[cyanydeez]

This reminds me of all the new companies that want to "help" you get your public information out of $CORPORATE hands; as if these companies will some how not succumb to either enshittification or breach.

The good thing about the grift economy is it grifts itself, like the turtles!