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> An Apple spokeswoman blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix. I don't envy the spokeswoman her

> An Apple spokeswoman blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix. I don't envy the spokeswoman her job, but this is hilariously off base from a linguistics perspective: * /tɹʌmp/ * /ˈɹeɪ.sɪst/ One word is two syllables, the other is one. One word has a bunch of sibilance and the other has none. One word has close front vowels (including a diphthong!) and the other has a single open back vowel. The only thing they have in common is the /ɹ/, but even that has a slightly different character when in a cluster with /t/. There's absolutely no way this was an accident of phonetics.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
[flagged]
- tmpz22 2y ago
  Is it not equally plausible that the data included social media content or other user input that interchanged trump and racism? Are we certain it was a manual weight that caused this? When did it become hip to cheer for people being fired? People we’ve never met, whose performance may never have even factored into the equation?
  - pavlov 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - nh23423fefe 2y ago
      the "everything is political" crowd elevates the discussion again
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        They just can't let it go
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    >Is it not equally plausible that the data included social media content or other user input that interchanged trump and racism? That's equally bad and paints Apple's AI development efforts poorly if they let sloppy training data like that get into production. Garbage in garbage out. They should have done better QA, they're only the richest company in the world by market cap, they can certainly find some change between the couch cushions for that. >When did it become hip to cheer for people being fired? When they inject their own biases I never asked for into products I spend good money for. I don't want my phone made in China by factories with suicide nets by a company embroiled in scandals on patent trolling, tax evasion and monopolistic practices[1], lecturing me on ethics, virtues and politics. This is who you choose to be your beacon of morality? I hope firings continue until the message sinks in that the product is there to serve the customer regardless of their political orientation, and not the other way around. I won't put up with entification and receiving lecturing on my own dime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.
    - tmpz22 2y ago
      Have you not committed the same transgressions? Advocated for policy or design that ended up being incorrect? Pushed rushed code? Become apathetic to a project and done less than stellar work? Misjudged your own experience and thus committed an error? Spoken about a cultural topic at work? Impacted customers by your wrongful action? We all do this. So when we cheer punishment for people who are the same as us, maybe we need to evaluate ourselves.
      - TMWNN 2y ago
        >Have you not committed the same transgressions? Nothing like this. >We all do this. Speak for yourself.
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        I am not a trillion dollar mega Corp. I am not using my employer's products to push my political beliefs. You're mixing up accidental mistakes with intestinal sabotage. If you hired a contractor to paint your house and he painted your house but added graffiti saying "Donald Trump is racist" wouldn't you fire them and ask for compensation?
extraduder_ire 2y ago
Can audio of someone speaking be reliably turned into something like IPA by a computer though? (Very interested if that exists) My impression is that they're working with fewer elements and a lot more fuzziness about what they are. I doubt we'll ever get a good writeup of exactly how this actually happens, but I'd really like to.
- lolinder 2y ago
  You're correct, I'm using the IPA as a proxy for the audio data they actually use, but it's a decent proxy. I'd have linked spectrograms if I could find them, but in general sibilants come out very heavily in the audio data, so the complete absence of sibilance in "Trump" alone would make it extremely unlikely that the words would get mixed up. The fact that the words are substantially different in length would also come out in the audio data, as would all of the other features that I mentioned. If you were to create spectrograms for each word they would be completely distinct from each other to even a human eye across multiple dimensions. There's no good reason to claim that phonetics are the reason why their advanced statistical model connected the two words.
- benmmurphy 2y ago
  I guess it depends how much of this is running on the device, and how much is running off the device. If its all running on the device then it might be possible for someone to inspect what exactly is going on. If important parts are running off the device then those parts will be a black box.
dqv 2y ago
That's a programmer's understanding of linguistics. You're highlighting descriptive features which are approximations of averages of how we speak English under perfect recording conditions in a specific dialect. There is way more variance and alternation to how people pronounce words than what you're suggesting. How those sounds get interpreted by STT engines is likewise subject to this same variance. IPA isn't code. We don't perfectly reproduce sounds when we're speaking and certainly not to the letter of an approximated IPA transcription. You didn't correctly transcribe Trump, btw. It's /ˈtɹəmp/ for American English. But it does exemplify my point: there are absolutely people who pronounce Trump with an unrounded vowel and STT engines have to account for this (and they get it wrong for people who are further from the average, outliers). There are a lot of people who use a triphthong when saying racist as in [ɹɘeɪ]. With a short recording window, it's totally plausible to have these sounds be misinterpreted.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

[flagged]

tmpz22 2y ago
Is it not equally plausible that the data included social media content or other user input that interchanged trump and racism? Are we certain it was a manual weight that caused this? When did it become hip to cheer for people being fired? People we’ve never met, whose performance may never have even factored into the equation?
- pavlov 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nh23423fefe 2y ago
    the "everything is political" crowd elevates the discussion again
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      They just can't let it go
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >Is it not equally plausible that the data included social media content or other user input that interchanged trump and racism? That's equally bad and paints Apple's AI development efforts poorly if they let sloppy training data like that get into production. Garbage in garbage out. They should have done better QA, they're only the richest company in the world by market cap, they can certainly find some change between the couch cushions for that. >When did it become hip to cheer for people being fired? When they inject their own biases I never asked for into products I spend good money for. I don't want my phone made in China by factories with suicide nets by a company embroiled in scandals on patent trolling, tax evasion and monopolistic practices[1], lecturing me on ethics, virtues and politics. This is who you choose to be your beacon of morality? I hope firings continue until the message sinks in that the product is there to serve the customer regardless of their political orientation, and not the other way around. I won't put up with entification and receiving lecturing on my own dime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.
  - tmpz22 2y ago
    Have you not committed the same transgressions? Advocated for policy or design that ended up being incorrect? Pushed rushed code? Become apathetic to a project and done less than stellar work? Misjudged your own experience and thus committed an error? Spoken about a cultural topic at work? Impacted customers by your wrongful action? We all do this. So when we cheer punishment for people who are the same as us, maybe we need to evaluate ourselves.
    - TMWNN 2y ago
      >Have you not committed the same transgressions? Nothing like this. >We all do this. Speak for yourself.
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      I am not a trillion dollar mega Corp. I am not using my employer's products to push my political beliefs. You're mixing up accidental mistakes with intestinal sabotage. If you hired a contractor to paint your house and he painted your house but added graffiti saying "Donald Trump is racist" wouldn't you fire them and ask for compensation?

extraduder_ire 2y ago

Can audio of someone speaking be reliably turned into something like IPA by a computer though? (Very interested if that exists) My impression is that they're working with fewer elements and a lot more fuzziness about what they are. I doubt we'll ever get a good writeup of exactly how this actually happens, but I'd really like to.

lolinder 2y ago
You're correct, I'm using the IPA as a proxy for the audio data they actually use, but it's a decent proxy. I'd have linked spectrograms if I could find them, but in general sibilants come out very heavily in the audio data, so the complete absence of sibilance in "Trump" alone would make it extremely unlikely that the words would get mixed up. The fact that the words are substantially different in length would also come out in the audio data, as would all of the other features that I mentioned. If you were to create spectrograms for each word they would be completely distinct from each other to even a human eye across multiple dimensions. There's no good reason to claim that phonetics are the reason why their advanced statistical model connected the two words.
benmmurphy 2y ago
I guess it depends how much of this is running on the device, and how much is running off the device. If its all running on the device then it might be possible for someone to inspect what exactly is going on. If important parts are running off the device then those parts will be a black box.

dqv 2y ago

That's a programmer's understanding of linguistics. You're highlighting descriptive features which are approximations of averages of how we speak English under perfect recording conditions in a specific dialect. There is way more variance and alternation to how people pronounce words than what you're suggesting. How those sounds get interpreted by STT engines is likewise subject to this same variance. IPA isn't code. We don't perfectly reproduce sounds when we're speaking and certainly not to the letter of an approximated IPA transcription. You didn't correctly transcribe Trump, btw. It's /ˈtɹəmp/ for American English. But it does exemplify my point: there are absolutely people who pronounce Trump with an unrounded vowel and STT engines have to account for this (and they get it wrong for people who are further from the average, outliers). There are a lot of people who use a triphthong when saying racist as in [ɹɘeɪ]. With a short recording window, it's totally plausible to have these sounds be misinterpreted.