Culture Intel, A 'White Nationalism' Slider Ain't It

Intel, A 'White Nationalism' Slider Ain't It​

Image: Intel

Intel gave a presentation at GDC a few weeks back, but I’m guessing nobody actually watched it because it took until this week for anyone to notice this absolutely absurd pitch from the company, which wants to use AI to monitor and censor “hate speech” in your online voice chat, and let users toggle just how much hate they want to hear.

It’s a service launching later this year called Bleep, which “is a user-facing application that uses AI to detect and redact audio based on user preferences.”Which basically means it will monitor audio as it comes out of your system, and mute/beep your speakers or headphones when it detects bad words.

It’ll detect those words using AI, but it’s the user preferences part of this that is the most hilarious/horrifying. Here’s a look at Bleep’s backend settings, and it is a technological hellscape.


Image: Intel

Feel free to fine tune! Would you like to hear people body-shaming you? Oh, you would? But only a little? OK, sure!


Image: Intel

So many choices! I deeply appreciate the fact I can only hear someone screaming white nationalist taunts down a microphone “most” of the time—sometimes you need a break, after all!—and will be thinking very hard about whether I want to toggle that N-word switch to its “on” or “off” position.

It’s ghastly that something like this ever left a whiteboard, let alone made it all the way into a major presentation, but then we’re years past the point where we should be expecting companies like Intel to think about anything except ways it can waste millions trying to use its own technology to combat deeply human problems.

Maybe there was a good intention here at some point. Letting people enjoy a safer online experience is, after all, a very good thing! But this, this is not the way to do it. Hateful speech is something that needs to be educated and fought, not toggled on a settings screen.

You can watch the presentation at around the 29:30 mark in the video below (though it should autoplay at that point if you click on it anyway).

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Intel, A 'White Nationalism' Slider Ain't It

Intel gave a presentation at GDC a few weeks back, but I’m guessing nobody actually watched it because it took until this week for anyone to notice this absolutely absurd pitch from the company, which wants to use AI to monitor and censor “hate speech” in your online voice chat, and let users...

kotaku.com

 

[Bland Crumbs]

Maybe Intel should spend more time working on getting to 7nm than engaging in social engineering.

 

[MODUS]

You can sense the author's intensive struggle to call this a bad idea without directly excusing "hate speech."

 

[WeWuzFinns]

Hopefully the community mods in a slider to make the Internet even more racist.

 

[rbzfan]

And Intel wonders why they've been going down the shitter in recent years. Focus on improving your CPU's, not this.

 

[round robin]

Come on! Hate speech can only be solved by draconian government overreach and re-education initiatives. We don't need robots getting in the way and having all the fun!

 

[Kamikaze]

Maybe Intel should spend more time working on getting to 7nm than engaging in social engineering.

Signaling submission to government insanity and getting contracts from the NSA is more profitable than making anything useful in the USA these days.

 

[Account]

Saw this on the fediverse.

 

[Ita Mori]

My niggo, you were so close to breaking the mold, then you went full retard by claiming everybody except crackers can be non-racist in jest and that there's any semblance of sanity in any of this.
If you don't want to hear insults, jeers, and thrash talk, play a PvE game or play with friends in private lobbies (after you acquire friends, which is difficult for people who think like kokomoman).

 

[Fomo Hoire]

It’s a service launching later this year called Bleep, which “is a user-facing application that uses AI to detect and redact audio based on user preferences.”Which basically means it will monitor audio as it comes out of your system, and mute/beep your speakers or headphones when it detects bad words.

This sounds like a swear filter, but more modern and able to handle audio instead of just text.

As kids the problem was always getting around the school blocks, but these dweebs grew up beg for them instead of subvert them. What losers!

In theory I like that this happens from the perciever end instead of the speaker end, so the adults can talk while the babies bleep themselves out of existence. In practice I don't trust Big Tech to not monitor people's preferences and subsequently penalize people for being insufficiently hysterical.

I deeply appreciate the fact I can only hear someone screaming white nationalist taunts down a microphone “most” of the time—sometimes you need a break, after all!—and will be thinking very hard about whether I want to toggle that N-word switch to its “on” or “off” position.

Wow, I know this is sarcasm, but that doesn't make it any less retarded. I for one actually feel differently about people cussing at me in different contexts. Admittedly the context is usually "who is speaking" which I'm assuming the system can't handle yet, but still. Does this fucker not have any friends? Nobody they're able to do some gentle ribbing with?

 

[Catch The Rainbow]

I think this isn't about racism but about testing new software for subject/context discussion. It's interesting that they offer grades of all/most/some/non instead of a simple on/off and the only real way to do that is to have AI analyzing conversations in real time and drawing conclusions from it. This would be great for advertising but they have to test it out publicly somehow and this seems to be the best way for them to do with while seeming woke.

 

[Judge Holden]

COMPUTER REMOVE ALL N-WORD INHIBITORS AND SET THE HOLOCAUST DENIAL MATRIX TO MAXIMUM

 

[whogoesthere]

I think this isn't about racism but about testing new software for subject/context discussion. It's interesting that they offer grades of all/most/some/non instead of a simple on/off and the only real way to do that is to have AI analyzing conversations in real time and drawing conclusions from it. This would be great for advertising but they have to test it out publicly somehow and this seems to be the best way for them to do with while seeming woke.

This guy, he reads obscure websites about the shady connection between Harvey Milk and Jim Jones. He knows World Vision is a CIA front. Completely correct about this, they have been for years looking for a way to get full scale acceptance of audio and visual control.

 

[Kheapathic]

That silicon supply line shortage is really hurting them if this is the kind of shit they're deciding to focus on.

 

[King Dead]

I think this isn't about racism but about testing new software for subject/context discussion. It's interesting that they offer grades of all/most/some/non instead of a simple on/off and the only real way to do that is to have AI analyzing conversations in real time and drawing conclusions from it. This would be great for advertising but they have to test it out publicly somehow and this seems to be the best way for them to do with while seeming woke.

It's really hard not to see a sinister motive behind this seemingly altruistic system. It's fun to laugh at a literal "N-word toggle," but who's to say the exact same technology couldn't be used to shut down other kinds of "objectionable" speech? I mean, it's really just a question of training the AIs to detect something besides gamerwords. Say, something along the lines of comparing a certain world leader's likeness to Winnie the Pooh? Maybe bringing up something that certainly didn't happen in Tienanmen Square in 1989? You just know that there are plenty of governments out there salivating at the prospect of shutting down wrongthink at the source, to say nothing of the demented assholes in Big Tech that literally vowed to make populism a blip in history.

Of course, leave it to the morons who both work at and still read Kotaku to have a problem with it for all the wrong reasons. If there's anything that will kill this before it gets off the ground, it's going the turbowoke route ("you're silencing black people! saying nigga is their culture!").

 

[Johan Schmidt]

At what point does making your own PC cottage industry style become practical? Because, we seem to be heading the way of requiring you to have all your electronic shit made bespoke to avoid peoples grimy hands wriggling around in your shit.

 

[StuffedBallot]

At what point does making your own PC cottage industry style become practical? Because, we seem to be heading the way of requiring you to have all your electronic shit made bespoke to avoid peoples grimy hands wriggling around in your shit.

It became practical at least 5-6 years ago when FPGAs became more commonplace, and 10 years ago when the drivers of computer progress stopped being actual applications but instead a nested horror show of virtual machine called a browser, and maybe AAA videogames, but even those are more GPU bound than CPU bound anyway.

You can put together a non-pozzed system and do work, text, graphics, etc, quite easily, you just have to give up the modern web as a concept.

Which in turn means you might actually (gasp) use your computer for work, not as a glorified web terminal.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

It became practical at least 5-6 years ago when FPGAs became more commonplace, and 10 years ago when the drivers of computer progress stopped being actual applications but instead a nested horror show of virtual machine called a browser, and maybe AAA videogames, but even those are more GPU bound than CPU bound anyway.

You can put together a non-pozzed system and do work, text, graphics, etc, quite easily, you just have to give up the modern web as a concept.

Which in turn means you might actually (gasp) use your computer for work, not as a glorified web terminal.

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about how the web is going to end up in like twenty-thirty years from now. It just seems inevitable that we're going to all be penned into region specific curated webs by various governments; but also that we're going to end up with multiple smaller networks within that those pens as well. The web has become increasingly infested with more and more bullshit as big companies figure out how to abuse, exploit and cut at it to try and make it fit within their ideal.

Sad shit.

 

[StuffedBallot]

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about how the web is going to end up in like twenty-thirty years from now. It just seems inevitable that we're going to all be penned into region specific curated webs by various governments; but also that we're going to end up with multiple smaller networks within that those pens as well.

We've been living in that world for the past 13 years at least. The fantastic thing about it is that it wasn't governments, or big corporations doing it. The users did it all to themselves, and created a self-perpetuating feedback loop that balkanized the internet more and more. WWW was a fluke, and the Endless September will truly never end until the AOLers go back to their own little private network.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

This guy, he reads obscure websites about the shady connection between Harvey Milk and Jim Jones. He knows World Vision is a CIA front. Completely correct about this, they have been for years looking for a way to get full scale acceptance of audio and visual control.

You have a link for that, frond? I want in.