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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

#241

Post by hedora »

sokoloff wrote: post #174
hedora wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#242

Post by sokoloff »

hedora wrote: post #241
sokoloff wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#243

Post by 0x457 »

gf000 wrote: post #223
0x457 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rule of thumb was "can it fit in RAM on a server?" If it can, then it's not big data. 500GB is in the "fits" category.

You can quadruple that and could still fit in server RAM

Correct, and until then it won't be "big data"

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

#245

Post by numpad0 »

nikkaelle wrote: post #238
numpad0 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

More or less everything changes. For trans men who are on HRT the voice's lowest pitch will get lower, as it would for someone AMAB going through puberty (since a second puberty is literally what's happening on HRT). Trans women do not get any voice changes from HRT though, so they train to raise their larynx when speaking to get up into the "perceived female range." But pitch is far from the only thing that someone…

Thanks - that matches my little observations and clears up a few questions I had. I did notice that spectrogram views are almost the same regardless of perceived gender except that the strongest bands and their distributions change, and also that perceived pitch isn't as dynamic as actual frequency shifts of harmonics, but didn't realize that the center frequency moving up had to do with both physical and figurative size. It makes sense.

One thing I've been feeling itchy regarding this domain is that a lot of existing resources are shallow and there aren't many gamified options even though things like rhythm game feels like a perfect fit. I think not a negligible number of people, especially young and inexperienced, are struggling with aggressive or dis-satisfied sounding voices against their intent. Just a laptop app to feedback the error between their intended voice and recognized voices to let them minimize the error feel like a useful thing to me.

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

#246

Post by Oravys »

Oravys wrote: 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…

[dead]

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

#247

Post by Henchman21 »

zkmon wrote: post #96
Henchman21 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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’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.

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

#248

Post by gowld »

MattGaiser wrote: post #160
gowld wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biometrics are fine. My dog has an ID chip in injected under his skin.

Your dog has nothing worth stealing and is not responsible for anything.

Missing the point. The point is well-chosen biometrics can be changed.

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

#249

Post by Sander_Marechal »

noosphr wrote: post #213
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#250

Post by nikkaelle »

numpad0 wrote: post #245
nikkaelle wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More or less everything changes. For trans men who are on HRT the voice's lowest pitch will get lower, as it would for someone AMAB going through puberty (since a second puberty is literally what's happening on HRT). Trans women do not get any voice changes from HRT though, so they train to raise their larynx when speaking to get up into the "perceived female range." But pitch is far from the only thing that someone…

Thanks - that matches my little observations and clears up a few questions I had. I did notice that spectrogram views are almost the same regardless of perceived gender except that the strongest bands and their distributions change, and also that perceived pitch isn't as dynamic as actual frequency shifts of harmonics, but didn't realize that the center frequency moving up had to do with both physical and figurative…

I've seen some people attempt to make a voice gender recognizer through machine learning, but nothing that has actually worked well. I'm not an ML expert, but I expect they're overfitting on just a small subset of accents and specific formants. The one I played with (can't find the link) was just trying to show weight vs resonance, and it got very confused by my voice. I am never misgendered from my voice but I (intentionally) have a slightly deeper femme voice than what it had been trained on.

IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.

(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)

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