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4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

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Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#141
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just take up smoking heavily

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

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

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable. I have the faintest possible hope that such things are going to be the death knell of social media. Yeah a lot of credulous idiots are happily giving AI thirst traps their money for stroking their confirmation bias, but that's just who's left at this point. It feels…

Mate you're on a social media site right now that often has AI-generated content displayed at the top of whats "trending". Sure the general user-base does a better job here flagging that sort of stuff, as AI seems to be a shared interest in much of the community, but it still sneaks it's way by

You’re technically right but I think we can all agree HN is significantly different from the major players. The vast majority of us see the same posts and comments, for starters. The churn of posts is also much slower. You log on 2-3 times spread out in a day and you see 90% of the main posts. Top posts linger for 24-48hrs regularly.

No media uploading, memes are few and far between (usually punished), etc.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#143
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#144

I wonder how many of the current text-to-speech ML models have large parts of leaked or "stolen" data in their training data? Almost none of the TTS releases seem to talk about exactly where they get their training data from, for some reason. I also wonder if we'll see an explosion in SOTA TTS in ~6 months from now.

GOOG-411 was "competing" with a strong company (1-800-FREE411) by serving no ads in a category worth ~$3.5B at the time. It was inexplicable at the time, but they did this to get voice samples, way back when. For reasons like that, I expect that this category of training is baked — but I don't have current domain knowledge fwiw.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#146

Man that’s pretty shitty that Mercor tricked 40k contractors, and then did a poor job of securing their data. There should be stronger consequences for stuff like this.

At minimum, collecting voiceprints should come with much stricter consent, retention and security requirements than ordinary "training data"

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#147

I wonder how many of the current text-to-speech ML models have large parts of leaked or "stolen" data in their training data? Almost none of the TTS releases seem to talk about exactly where they get their training data from, for some reason. I also wonder if we'll see an explosion in SOTA TTS in ~6 months from now.

Yep, the silence around provenance is probably the most suspicious part

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#148
post #2

Author here. Wrote this after watching Lapsus$ post the Mercor archive on their leak site earlier this month. The thing that struck me is the combination: voice samples paired with ID document scans. Most breaches leak one or the other. This one ships a deepfake-ready kit. Tried to keep the writeup practical: what an attacker can actually do with this combo (banking voiceprint bypass, Arup-style video calls, insuranc…

HSBC offered voice verification years ago and I just laughed and said nope.

I don’t even use biometrics on apple devices, I use a 6 digit pin.

It was always a stupid idea.

The thing about been willing to trade convenience for security is you get called paranoid and then when the other shoe does drop and you are still doing that you still get called paranoid for the current thing you are not doing that “everyone does”.

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

#150
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> 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.

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.
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