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Comment by snicksnak | Hacker News Reader

This trope is everywhere now. I see this so often now where high profile substack writers are constantly being smeared as transphobic. It's a tactic, and defense and offense strategy and I'm tired of it. Can't take anyone serious anymore how writes something like that.

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Or you could be charitable to the author and at least try to understand their view instead of assuming that it’s some cold political move.

Machine learning detection of people’s gender in the real world is anywhere from annoying to distressing to trans people because all the training data is cis people and so they get matched with their AGAB. Can you imagine how terrible it would be to already hate and be super self-conscious about your voice only to have Spotify start telling you via recommendations that you don’t pass well enough. Yikes.

> Can you imagine how terrible it would be to already hate and be super self-conscious about your voice only to have Spotify start telling you via recommendations that you don’t pass well enough.

Although the patent may be creepy...

The text of the patent refers to media recommendation (not advertising) - contrary to the sibling comment where you claim it will result in ads for Dollar Shave Club, the patent does not once use the term "advertising". Sure, it could be used for that, but I don't think that's the main intention at all.

How are you going to know that Spotify has recommended you a song based on your gender? Are we assigning genders to songs now? Straight white cis males can like Aqua's "Barbie Girl", too.

> Are we assigning genders to songs now? Straight white cis males can like Aqua's "Barbie Girl", too.

This is an absurd take. Do you see no difference between Spotify recommending songs to a trans woman based on what men with similar music tastes in her area and age group are listening to and "assigning gender to songs?"

Spotify also typically recommends you playlists rather than songs and my home page is extremely gendered. I get playlists like "You Go Girl", "Girls Like You", "Women of Rock", "Fierce Femmes." A trans guy getting these kinds of recommendations would be ... well odd.

You don't need to be a woman to enjoy a "Women in Hip Hop" playlist. Spotify isn't about what it thinks you are. It's about what it thinks you want to listen to.

And what it thinks you want to listen to is based on what it gender it thinks you are. Gender is a strong signal about what your music tastes will be but obviously it's not absolute. If the algorithm is so pure and unbiased then why would it even want to determine your gender with this patent?

Like recommendation engines aren't magic -- they look at what people "like you" listen to where "like you" has all sorts of random demographic data as well as your personal patterns/history.

> It's about what it thinks you want to listen to.

At the moment, but I think the idea behind this patent is that it can factor in your mood (and other factors, such as gender) into the recommendation engine as well as what you already like.

Though I don't see gender being much of a signal. My GF and I have exactly the same taste in music (well, she doesn't like Classical that much, and I don't like Musicals, and she's more into Goth/Industrial/Metal than I am, but it's a 90% match). Anecdata, but that's all I have.

Imagine the algorithm recommending hip-hop because you have dark skin and African-like facial features.

It's maybe not that bad of the grand scheme of things, but it's inarguably racist.

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