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Comment by tsol | Hacker News Reader

Did they respond differently depending on what race they thought you were? I'm surprised they would even do that honestly. I thought they were trained on text conversations which presumably wouldn't have any of that to learn from.

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You can often tell where someone is from from text alone! There are plenty of idiosyncrasies even in how different English speaking countries use the language.

Ah stop

Like, what do you mean? Are there, like, particular mannerisms that people from some regions that are hella unique to those regions?

I say old chap, what colour are your mummy’s wellies?

Clever!

You betcha!

All my Indian colleagues say "I agree with the same", this "the same" turn of phrase was so strange to me I had to ask (I'm French, so I have my own silly quirks, like I forget non-vocal plural(s<-- see, often I don't write that s)). They told me it was like that in Hindi so they just reproduce the pattern and it's grammatically acceptable.

For French people like me, false friends are immediately noticeable: for instance, "actually" to mean "now" instead of "in fact".

>like I forget non-vocal plural(s<-- see, often I don't write that s)).

c'est infernal. infernal

Pre-nerf the 4o voice model had a wide range of expressivity, and it would match affect (still tries to do this) and idiolect of listeners if asked. Nowadays there's a list of accents that are considered "hate-ish" and a list that aren't.

I will elide the rant inside me that west coast 20 somethings get to decide if speaking in a certain accent is racist or "bad". But it's a heartfelt rant.

There are subtle differences in language where two groups can be speaking English and one is having a completely different conversation without saying much.

This is quite the reason my wife evolved into my ex-wife.

If it did, it responded based on the accent it picked up on not race, because race and accent are orthogonal, correlation does not imply causation.

Are denying that race and accent are highly correlated?

No, I'm saying that it is more meaningful to use what is directly derived rather than what is an indirect assumption. There is already issues with people erroneously considering whatever LLMs output as truth, the last thing anyone needs is an LLM claiming someone like Idris Elba is a white Briton because of his accent. We don't need automated phrenology machines, and that's what "determined your race from your voice" is pretty close to.

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