The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread
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Good idea IMO.
Edit: it’s paywalled. Copy paste below:
AI is coming for our anger
A SoftBank project is working on technology that takes the rage out of customer phone callsI’m a human being God damn it! My life has value! . . . I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!
Howard Beale, the prophetically fuming anti-hero from the 1976 film Network, was certainly very angry. Increasingly, according to successive Gallup surveys of the world’s emotional state, we all are.
But possibly not for much longer if artificial intelligence has any say in it. AI was already coming for our jobs; now it is coming for our fury. The question is whether anything has a right to take that fury without permission, and whether anyone is ready to fight for our right to rage.
This month, the separately listed mobile arm of Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank technology empire revealed that it was developing an AI-powered system to protect browbeaten workers in call centres from down-the-line diatribes and the broad palette of verbal abuse that falls under the definition of customer harassment.
It is unclear if SoftBank was deliberately seeking to evoke dystopia when it named this project, but “EmotionCancelling Voice Conversion Engine” has a bleakness that would turn George Orwell green.
The technology, developed at an AI research institute established by SoftBank and the University of Tokyo, is still in its R&D phase, and the early demo version suggests there is plenty more work ahead. But the principle is already sort of working, and it is as weird as you might expect.
In theory, the voice-altering AI changes the rant of an angry human caller in real time so the person at the other end hears only a softened, innocuous version. The caller’s original vocabulary remains intact (for now; give dystopia time to solve that one). But, tonally, the rage is expunged. Commercialisation and installation in call centres, reckons SoftBank, can be expected sometime before March 2026.
Show video description
Softbank is developing an AI-powered system to protect workers in call centres from furious phone calls and customer harassment by altering voices to sound softer. The project is still at an early stage - this is a demo of how far it’s come, with the angry and the modified voice. © Softbank
As with so many of these projects, humans have collaborated for cash with their future AI overlords. The EmotionCancelling engine was trained using actors who performed a large range of angry phrases and a gamut of ways of giving outlet to ire such as shouting and shrieking. These provide the AI with the pitches and inflections to detect and replace.Set aside the various hellscapes this technology conjures up. The least imaginative among us can see ways in which real-time voice alteration could open a lot of perilous paths. The issue, for now, is ownership: the lightning evolution of AI is already severely testing questions of voice ownership by celebrities and others; SoftBank’s experiment is testing the ownership of emotion.
SoftBank’s project was clearly well intentioned. The idea apparently came to one of the company’s AI engineers who watched a film about rising abusiveness among Japanese customers towards service-sector workers — a phenomenon some ascribe to the crankiness of an ageing population and the erosion of service standards by acute labour shortages.
The EmotionCancelling engine is presented as a solution to the intolerable psychological burden placed on call centre operators, and the stress of being shouted at. As well as stripping rants of their frightening tone, the AI will step in to terminate conversations it deems have been too long or vile.
But protection of the workers should not be the only consideration here. Anger may be a very unpleasant and scary thing to receive, but it can be legitimate and there must be caution in artificially writing it out of the customer relations script — particularly if it only increases when the customer realises their expressed rage is being suppressed by a machine.
Businesses everywhere can — and do — warn customers against abusing staff. But removing anger from someone’s voice without their permission (or by burying that permission in fine print) steps over an important line, especially when AI is put in charge of the removal.
The line crossed is where a person’s emotion, or a certain tone of voice, is commoditised for treatment and neutralisation. Anger is an easy target for excision, but why not get AI to protect call centre operators from disappointment, sadness, urgency, despair or even gratitude? What if it were decided that some regional accents were more threatening than others and sandpapered by algorithm without their owners knowing?
In an extensive series of essays published last week, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI who worked on protecting society from the technology, warned that while everyone was talking about AI, “few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them”.
Our best strategy, in the face of all this, may be to remain as mad as hell.
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Wow, what shitbags. Not using AI to improve their shit service, instead use AI to reduce call center turnover to improve their bottom line. I think Putin has a bigger heart than some of our banks.
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I would have thought the AI search answers would expose Google to lawsuits from people getting sick or dying after following dangerous and wrong advice (I’m sure their lawyers are better than me at this stuff though).
Now I’m wondering how the below doesn’t expose them to false advertising or damages from malware ads since they are now actively writing the sales pitch and not just publishing someone else’s claims.
Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick.com)
Google Ads bringing Automatically Created Assets to the ad level? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-automatically-created-assets-to-ad-level-37610.html #googleads #google
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Damn, I’m finding Copilot (formerly Bing Chat, and probably a half dozen other names) has taken a massive hit in usefulness recently. I’m now almost positive that it’s trying to match your query against a previously asked one and serving up the cached answer. I’ve tried rephrasing the question only to get the exact same answer back. Makes sense they’d try it given how expensive that shit is to process but it means that 30+% of the time I’m getting answers that are for questions I didn’t ask. I think we’re starting to see the wheels fall off of this whole fad. I think the company I’m working for is paying for this shit too.
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Apparently AI is using all the power in the world and we will soon be back to using whale oil lamps.
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Lob would be rich if this happened in the US.
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I use bitorrent semi-regularly but only for open source software downloads - why overload the software provider’s server when you can get it P2P and usually much faster? I’d be fucking furious if they fucked around with me just because I’m using a p2p protocol that is also used by people sharing pirated content.
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Exclusive: Gemini's data-analyzing abilities aren't as good as Google claims
New research shows that Google might be overstating its generative AI's ability to reason over long documents.
Tested on one book around 260,000 words (~520 pages) in length, the researchers found that 1.5 Pro answered the true/false statements correctly 46.7% of the time while Flash answered correctly only 20% of the time. That means a coin is significantly better at answering questions about the book than Google’s latest machine learning model.
Ouch
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Posting for the headline:
China to ramp up brain chip program after teaching monkey to control robot
I vaguely remember the above website from my crypto days; got no idea why Google News includes it in its feed.
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
Posting for the headline:
China to ramp up brain chip program after teaching monkey to control robot
I vaguely remember the above website from my crypto days; got no idea why Google News includes it in its feed.
Central tech to a lot of cyberpunk devices, including bionics, thought driven vehicles especially fighter craft, full sensory experience override virtual worlds and criminalized versions of same for hacking AIs for data gold.
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The mind chipped monkeys controlling robots sounded like a unique combination to me.
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@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
thought driven vehicles especially fighter craft
about 40 years ago i kicked around the idea that, since birds have superior vision, balance, and spatial awareness, perhaps one day computer-linked bird brains could offer superior control of robot drone aircraft. this headline about chinese-monkey-brain-controlled robots makes me think my idea’s time has come, or at least is much nearer.
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There goes our FPS
Multiple nations enact mysterious export controls on quantum computers
Identical wording placing limits on the export of quantum computers has appeared in regulations across the globe. There doesn't seem to be any scientific reason for the controls, and all can be traced to secret international discussions
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@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
There goes our FPS
Multiple nations enact mysterious export controls on quantum computers
Identical wording placing limits on the export of quantum computers has appeared in regulations across the globe. There doesn't seem to be any scientific reason for the controls, and all can be traced to secret international discussions
i expect they all got too accustomed to carte blanche spying on their populace to allow secure quantum communication.
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or maybe machines with more than 34 qbits become self-aware?
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Tech stuff for Kyle. 1970s should be fairly modern for him.
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@oyaji said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
i expect they all got too accustomed to carte blanche spying on their populace to allow secure quantum communication.
this and it really wouldn’t be awesome if Iran, China, Best Korea, etc had the ability to instantly brute force AES-256 encryption. Or the Houthis.
The spying, yeah that sucks but actual terror organizations having the ability to idk open the flood gates at all the dams on the eastern seaboard … decidedly worse.
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@madrebel said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
@oyaji said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
i expect they all got too accustomed to carte blanche spying on their populace to allow secure quantum communication.
this and it really wouldn’t be awesome if Iran, China, Best Korea, etc had the ability to instantly brute force AES-256 encryption. Or the Houthis.
i think you are looking at this backwards. my thought was that quantum communication is secure, unhackable, and cannot be spied upon without the principals overtly granting access.
such being the case, the powers that be don’t want their peoples free from surveillance.
The spying, yeah that sucks but actual terror organizations having the ability to idk open the flood gates at all the dams on the eastern seaboard … decidedly worse.
hmmm. hard for me to get worked up over ‘terror organizations’.
i could elaborate but you wouldn’t like it much.
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@oyaji said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
my thought was that quantum communication is secure, unhackable, and cannot be spied upon without the principals overtly granting access.
yes, quantum comms are all sorts of Schrodinger’s cat … however a true Quantum computers ability to blast through existing X86_64 systems is the problem as it is in theory, trivial.
The world isn’t going to switch to Quantum computers instantly or perhaps ever. The likelihood you and I would ever own a quantum computer in our lifetime atm is extremely slim. Now this statement is one major breakthrough away from being a Gates like “nobody will need more than X memory” but as it stands, Quantum computing is extremely niche and requires multiple PHDs to even play pong.
A country with a significantly worse ideology to any/all Western nations having one though is, depending on who you believe, worse than a Nuclear exchange because, well, if existing key pair exchange encryption can be instantly broken it could involve a Nuclear exchange … remember Superman and The Office? What is stopping a bad actor from just taking everyone’s money? Forget about siphoning fractions of a penny, you could just move all the money and it would appear as a legitimate request. Shutting off power plants. Hacking into Teslas and sending cars off over passes. Hacking into autopilot systems, air traffic control, etc etc etc.
Anything that uses non quantum encryption may as well be unprotected.
@oyaji said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:
hmmm. hard for me to get worked up over ‘terror organizations’.
So you’re not aware of the issues occurring in the Red Sea atm and how that is impacting trade? You can’t imagine how having the ability to break into port control systems, boat control systems, radar systems, etc etc could make this worse?
How about this, imagine what the CIA could do if their false flags appear as legitimate traffic originating from Iranian systems using legitimate Iranian users accounts that were broken into via brute force. All access and traffic logs would appear as legit.
You’re grossly missing the mark if spying is what you’re worried about here. They’re already spying on you.
Korean ISP Hacks Customers Using Torrent Software
