> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 (^_^).
The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.
Also: it’s not just the first order smoking, respiratory issues, increased chance of illness, and chronic coughing can damage your voices presentation.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said it that way. What I meant was "remember high school?" Reading back i think it could look like "are you someone who didn't go to high school, because you sound uneducated?" Not my intent, and not something i would say.
The situations you describe are not what I have experienced, which I guess makes me lucky.
My point was that in discovery, the idle chatter of know-nothings looks bad. But if there are companies that really have something to hide, well I guess that's what discovery is for. And as for your manager pal, if someone did that I'd be looking for work that very afternoon.
>Sorry, I shouldn't have said it that way. What I meant was "remember high school?" Reading back i think it could look like "are you someone who didn't go to high school, because you sound uneducated?" Not my intent, and not something i would say.
apology accepted and I rescind my insult.
> My point was that in discovery, the idle chatter of know-nothings looks bad. But if there are companies that really have something to hide, well I guess that's what discovery is for. And as for your manager pal, if someone did that I'd be looking for work that very afternoon.
I did, switched jobs a few weeks later after that. Did keep the paper and let him know I still had it just to fuck with him back during those weeks however.
> The situations you describe are not what I have experienced, which I guess makes me lucky.
It may be the opposite and I was just unlucky, but I have run into multiple situations with companies making 100s of millions to billions a year where that sort of behavior occurred, so if people are being trained to hide unfortunate conversations then I am going to assume the worst barring large amounts of contrary evidence.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
One aspect you have to consider is the differences in human beings doing the evaluation. I had a coworker/report who would hand me obvious garbage tier code with glaring issues even in its output, and it would take multiple iterations to address very specific review comments (once, in frustration, I showed a snippet of their output to my nontechnical mom and even my mom wtf’ed and pointed out the problem unprompted); I’m sure all the AI-generated code I painstakingly spec, review and fix is totally amazing to them and need very little human input. Not saying it must be the case here, that was extreme, but it’s a very likely factor.
This is plausible. Assuming it’s true, we would see the adoption of vibe coding at a faster rate amongst inexperienced developers. I think that’s true.
A counterpoint is Google saying the vast majority of their code is written by AI. The developers at Google are not inexperienced. They build complex critical systems.
But it still feels odd to me, this contradiction. Yes there’s some skill to using AI but that doesn’t feel enough to explain the gap in perception. Your point would really explain it wonderfully well, but it’s contradicted by pronouncements by major companies.
One thing I would add is that code quality is absolutely tanking. PG mentioned YC companies adopted AI generated code at Google levels years ago. Yesterday I was using the software of one such company and it has “Claude code” levels of bugginess. I see it in a bunch of startups. One of the tells is they seem to experience regressions, which is bizarre. I guess that indicates bugs with their AI generated tests.
This is magical because you are both on the exact right path and not right. My theory is there’s a sort of skill to teasing code from AI (or maybe not and it’s alchemy all over again) and this is all new enough and we don’t have a common vocabulary for it that it’s hard for one person who is having a good experience and one person who is not to meaningfully sort out what they are doing differently.
Alternatively, it could be there’s a large swath of people out there so stupid they are proud of code your mom can somehow review and suggest improvements in despite being nontechnical.
> This is magical because you are both on the exact right path and not right. My theory is there’s a sort of skill to teasing code from AI (or maybe not and it’s alchemy all over again) and this is all new enough and we don’t have a common vocabulary for it that it’s hard for one person who is having a good experience and one person who is not to meaningfully sort out what they are doing differently.
I don't think this is a hypothesis.
Outside of asking for one-shot tasks that have been done a million times before, LLMs do not "default" to good work.
If you ask them over-and-over again to find holes in their solution, to fix them, to evaluate for tech debt, to test all cases, to re-asses after the cases if it's architecturally coherent, to compare to the closest available known good implementations, etc etc, they can eventually get what you want done unbelievably cheaply to an acceptable level of quality.
I mentioned initially - their work is unbelievably cheap, you should be EAGER to reject it. Most people wouldn't even bend down to pick a penny up off the sidewalk. They can literally pump out CLs for a penny. You shouldn't even waste time looking at "I'm done" until they've gone through 10+ rounds of reviews, refactors, bug fixes, thought of more test cases, compared to known implementations, etc.
Why are you going to spend ~$50-$100+ of your time reviewing $0.01 of LLM time?! It makes no sense!
If you just listen to them say "I'm done" and move on to their next task, it won't take too many days before you're swimming in a sea of incoherent garbage.
That’s not a given. Self-hosted GitLab on my pretty good hardware is still slow. I just opened a very small repo with ~20 files and ~5 commits. The page spun for 5s+ before showing me the directory listing and readme. Subsequent loads are faster (~1s) but still not instant.
Common pattern of checking the claude code issue tracker for a bug: land on issue #12587, auto closed as duplicate of #12043; check #12043, auto closed as duplicated of #11657; check #11657, auto closed as duplicate of #10645; check #10645, never got a response, or closed as not planned, or some other bullshit.
By having a reasonably successful open source project while in university. Someone reached out with work in a relevant area. I suppose that gate is mostly shut off these days with the volume of vibe-coded crap (or even non-crap) and uptick of clearly fraudulent stars on GitHub.
It wouldn't be so irritating if thinking didn't start to take a lot longer for tasks of similar complexity (or maybe it's taking longer to even start to think behind the scenes due to queueing).
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