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Thinking about that time Berkeley delisted thousands of recordings of course content as a result of a lawsuit complaining that they could not be utilized by dea

Thinking about that time Berkeley delisted thousands of recordings of course content as a result of a lawsuit complaining that they could not be utilized by deaf individuals. Can this be resolved with current technology? Google's auto captioning has been abysmal up to this point, I've often wondered what the cost would be for google to run modern tech over the entire backlog of youtube. At least then they might have a new source of training data. https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-capture-content/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-co... Discussed at the time (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

delusional 2y ago
That's a legal issue. If humans wanted that content to be up, we just could have agreed to keep it up. Legal issues don't get solved by technology.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Well. The legal complaint was that transcripts don't exist. The issue was that it was prohibitively expensive to resolve the complaint. Now that transcription is 0.1% of the cost it was 8 years ago, maybe the complaint could have been resolved. Is building a ramp to meet ADA requirements not using technology to solve a legal issue?
  - delusional 2y ago
    Nowhere on the linked page at least does it say that it was due to cost. It would seem more likely to me that it was a question of nobody wanting to bother standing up for the videos. If nobody wants to take the fight, the default judgement becomes to take it down. Building a ramp solves a problem. Pointing at a ramp 5 blocks away 7 years later and asking "doesn't this solve this issue" doesn't.
    - pests 2y ago
      Yet this feels very harrison bergeron to me. To handicap those with ability so we all can be at the same level.
      - fuzzy_biscuit 2y ago
        Right. The judgment doesn't help people with disabilities at all. It only punishes the rest of the population.
- yard2010 2y ago
  Yet. Legal issues don't get solved by tech yet!
andai 2y ago
Didn't YouTube have auto-captions at the time this was discussed? Yeah they're a bit dodgy but I often watch videos in public with sound muted and 90% of the time you can guess what word it was meant to be from context. (And indeed more recent models do way, way, way better on accuracy.)
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Definitely depends on audio quality and how closely a speaker's dialect matches the mid-atlantic accent, if you catch my drift. IME youtube transcripts are completely devoid of meaningful information, especially when domain-specific vocabulary is used.
- zehaeva 2y ago
  I have a few Deaf/Hard of Hearing friends who find the auto-captions to be basically useless. Anything that's even remotely domain specific becomes a garbled mess. Even watching documentaries about light engineering/archeology/history subjects are hilariously bad. Names of historical places and people are randomly correct and almost always never consistent. The second anyone has a bit of an accent then it's completely useless. I keep them on partially because I'm of the "everything needs to have subtitles else I can't hear the words they're saying" cohort. So I can figure out what they really mean, but if you couldn't hear anything I can see it being hugely distracting/distressing/confusing/frustrating.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    With this context, it seems as though correction-by-LLM might be a net win among your Deaf/HoH friends even if it would be a net loss for you, since you're able to correct on the fly better than an LLM probably would, while the opposite is more often true for them, due to differences in experience with phonetics? Soundex [0] is a prevailing method of codifying phonetic similarity, but unfortunately it's focused on names exclusively. Any correction-by-LLM really ought to generate substitution probabilities weighted heavily on something like that, I would think. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
hackernewds 2y ago
What a silly requirement? Since 1% cannot benefit, let's remove it for the 99%
- 3abiton 2y ago
  It's one of those "to motivate the horse to run 1% faster, you add shit ton of weight on top of it" strategy.
- IanCal 2y ago
  The problem is that having that rule results in those 1%s always being excluded. It's probably worth just going back and looking at the arguments for laws around accessibility.
  - mst 2y ago
    Yeah, every time I try and figure out an approach that could've avoided this being covered by the rules without making it easy for everybody to screw over deaf people entirely I end up coming to the conclusion that there probably isn't one. I'm somewhat tempted to think that whoever sued berkeley and had the whole thing taken down in this specific case was just being a knob, but OTOH there's issues even with that POV in terms of letting precedents be set that will de facto still become "screw over deaf people entirely" even when everybody involved is doing their best to act in good faith. Hopefully speech-to-text and text-to-speech will make the question moot in the medium term.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      > Hopefully speech-to-text and text-to-speech will make the question moot in the medium term. I really think this and other tech advances are going to be our saviors. It's still early days and it sometimes gets things wrong, but it's going to get good and it will basically allow us to have our cake and eat it too (as long as we can prevent having automated solutions banned).
      - mst 2y ago
IanCal 2y ago
Probably quite expensive over the whole catalog but the Berkley content would be cheap to do. If it's, say, 5000 hours then through the best model at assembly.ai with no discounts it's cost less than $2000. I know someone could do whisper for cheaper, and there likely would be discounts at this rate but worst case it seems very doable even for an individual.
- ldenoue 2y ago
  My repo doesn't re process the audio track: instead it makes the raw ASR text transcript better by feeding it additional info (title and description) and asking the LLM to fix errors. It is not perfect, it'd sometimes replace words with a synonym, but it is much faster and cheaper. The low cost of Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B costs $1 per 500 hours of transcript.
- ei23 2y ago
  With a RTX4090 and insanly-fast-whisper on whisper-large-v3-turbo (see Whisper-WebUI for easy testing) you can transscribe 5000h on consumer hardware in about 50h with timestamps. So, yeah. I also know someone.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    I can also run this all locally, my point was more that at the worst right now the most advanced model (afaik, I'm not personally benchmarking) paid for at the headline rates, for a huge content library, costs such a reasonable amount that an individual can do it. I've donated more to single charities than this would cost, while it's not an insignificant sum it's a "find one person who cares enough" level problem. Grabbing the audio from thousands of hours of video, or even just managing getting the content from wherever it's stored, is probably more of an issue than actually creating the transcripts. If anyone reading this has access to the original recordings, this is a pretty great time to get transcriptions.
georgecmu 2y ago
A bit of an aside, but the entire Berkeley collection has been saved by and is available at archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22webcast.berkeley%22 https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22webcast.berkel... It would be great if they were annotated and served in a more user-friendly fashion. As a bonus link, one of my favorite courses from the time: https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_354823242/01.+2008-08-28+-+Lecture+1.mp3 https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_35482...
- freedomben 2y ago
  Neat, thanks!

delusional 2y ago

That's a legal issue. If humans wanted that content to be up, we just could have agreed to keep it up. Legal issues don't get solved by technology.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
Well. The legal complaint was that transcripts don't exist. The issue was that it was prohibitively expensive to resolve the complaint. Now that transcription is 0.1% of the cost it was 8 years ago, maybe the complaint could have been resolved. Is building a ramp to meet ADA requirements not using technology to solve a legal issue?
- delusional 2y ago
  Nowhere on the linked page at least does it say that it was due to cost. It would seem more likely to me that it was a question of nobody wanting to bother standing up for the videos. If nobody wants to take the fight, the default judgement becomes to take it down. Building a ramp solves a problem. Pointing at a ramp 5 blocks away 7 years later and asking "doesn't this solve this issue" doesn't.
  - pests 2y ago
    Yet this feels very harrison bergeron to me. To handicap those with ability so we all can be at the same level.
    - fuzzy_biscuit 2y ago
      Right. The judgment doesn't help people with disabilities at all. It only punishes the rest of the population.
yard2010 2y ago
Yet. Legal issues don't get solved by tech yet!

andai 2y ago

Didn't YouTube have auto-captions at the time this was discussed? Yeah they're a bit dodgy but I often watch videos in public with sound muted and 90% of the time you can guess what word it was meant to be from context. (And indeed more recent models do way, way, way better on accuracy.)

jazzyjackson 2y ago
Definitely depends on audio quality and how closely a speaker's dialect matches the mid-atlantic accent, if you catch my drift. IME youtube transcripts are completely devoid of meaningful information, especially when domain-specific vocabulary is used.
zehaeva 2y ago
I have a few Deaf/Hard of Hearing friends who find the auto-captions to be basically useless. Anything that's even remotely domain specific becomes a garbled mess. Even watching documentaries about light engineering/archeology/history subjects are hilariously bad. Names of historical places and people are randomly correct and almost always never consistent. The second anyone has a bit of an accent then it's completely useless. I keep them on partially because I'm of the "everything needs to have subtitles else I can't hear the words they're saying" cohort. So I can figure out what they really mean, but if you couldn't hear anything I can see it being hugely distracting/distressing/confusing/frustrating.
- hunter2_ 2y ago
  With this context, it seems as though correction-by-LLM might be a net win among your Deaf/HoH friends even if it would be a net loss for you, since you're able to correct on the fly better than an LLM probably would, while the opposite is more often true for them, due to differences in experience with phonetics? Soundex [0] is a prevailing method of codifying phonetic similarity, but unfortunately it's focused on names exclusively. Any correction-by-LLM really ought to generate substitution probabilities weighted heavily on something like that, I would think. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

hackernewds 2y ago

What a silly requirement? Since 1% cannot benefit, let's remove it for the 99%

3abiton 2y ago
It's one of those "to motivate the horse to run 1% faster, you add shit ton of weight on top of it" strategy.
IanCal 2y ago
The problem is that having that rule results in those 1%s always being excluded. It's probably worth just going back and looking at the arguments for laws around accessibility.
- mst 2y ago
  Yeah, every time I try and figure out an approach that could've avoided this being covered by the rules without making it easy for everybody to screw over deaf people entirely I end up coming to the conclusion that there probably isn't one. I'm somewhat tempted to think that whoever sued berkeley and had the whole thing taken down in this specific case was just being a knob, but OTOH there's issues even with that POV in terms of letting precedents be set that will de facto still become "screw over deaf people entirely" even when everybody involved is doing their best to act in good faith. Hopefully speech-to-text and text-to-speech will make the question moot in the medium term.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    > Hopefully speech-to-text and text-to-speech will make the question moot in the medium term. I really think this and other tech advances are going to be our saviors. It's still early days and it sometimes gets things wrong, but it's going to get good and it will basically allow us to have our cake and eat it too (as long as we can prevent having automated solutions banned).
    - mst 2y ago

IanCal 2y ago

Probably quite expensive over the whole catalog but the Berkley content would be cheap to do. If it's, say, 5000 hours then through the best model at assembly.ai with no discounts it's cost less than $2000. I know someone could do whisper for cheaper, and there likely would be discounts at this rate but worst case it seems very doable even for an individual.

ldenoue 2y ago
My repo doesn't re process the audio track: instead it makes the raw ASR text transcript better by feeding it additional info (title and description) and asking the LLM to fix errors. It is not perfect, it'd sometimes replace words with a synonym, but it is much faster and cheaper. The low cost of Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B costs $1 per 500 hours of transcript.
ei23 2y ago
With a RTX4090 and insanly-fast-whisper on whisper-large-v3-turbo (see Whisper-WebUI for easy testing) you can transscribe 5000h on consumer hardware in about 50h with timestamps. So, yeah. I also know someone.
- IanCal 2y ago
  I can also run this all locally, my point was more that at the worst right now the most advanced model (afaik, I'm not personally benchmarking) paid for at the headline rates, for a huge content library, costs such a reasonable amount that an individual can do it. I've donated more to single charities than this would cost, while it's not an insignificant sum it's a "find one person who cares enough" level problem. Grabbing the audio from thousands of hours of video, or even just managing getting the content from wherever it's stored, is probably more of an issue than actually creating the transcripts. If anyone reading this has access to the original recordings, this is a pretty great time to get transcriptions.

georgecmu 2y ago

A bit of an aside, but the entire Berkeley collection has been saved by and is available at archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22webcast.berkeley%22 https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22webcast.berkel... It would be great if they were annotated and served in a more user-friendly fashion. As a bonus link, one of my favorite courses from the time: https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_354823242/01.+2008-08-28+-+Lecture+1.mp3 https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_35482...

freedomben 2y ago
Neat, thanks!