A short (AI-is-Racist)-adjacent tale

Back in the 80’s I worked for Verbex, a speech-recognition company attempting to release a product that would recognize all ten digits, when spoken, from ‘zero’ to ‘nine’. We trained it on a huge data set of sample speakers. It worked great… until it was released int the wide world and had a lot of problems recognizing a lot of numbers, especially the number “four”. You see, we purchased the “huge data set of sample speakers” from Digital, A New England Company. And nearly all of the sample speakers were from New England.

You know what they say, “gahbahge in, gahbahge out”