I had the same personal experience that you mention but I didn’t want to go into it because I thought my post was already too long.
I was actually getting almost all middle-aged white guy woodworkers, until I began searching for specific projects ideas, for example a new workbench. As the algorithm started feeding me project specific suggestions rather than just generic “woodworking” videos, a lot a female woodworkers popped up because they’d done videos on those specific projects (Tamar Hannah, April Wilkerson etc).
After I watched some of those videos I now get a very different feed of recommended woodworking videos. My personal reality has shifted quite a bit.
Google already knows so much about all of us (including the demographics of its subscribers, which would include channel owners), that I would not be surprised if they do do that sort of thing at some level, no tags needed. It may be as simple as a “Until other factors kick in, present User with videos by people demographically like themselves” directive.
I know fuck-all about what Google does, but I can confirm that the technology exists for a computer to examine an image or video and identify the features therein. If there is a cat, or a bicycle, or a man, or a woman, or whatever, it can see that.
You could try searching for videos in a clean, historyless environment (so without logging in, browser or IP address history, etc.) and see what changes, if anything.
The algorithm doesn’t need to explicitly identify things like that in the video, but groupings could still come about if they are representative of other people’s existing preferences, that is to say: people can exert their preferences upon the algorithm by watching, clicking like/dislike, commenting, subscribing or unsubscribing, and when they do, the algorithm will tend to relay any bias within those preferences to other individuals that it identifies as being within a similar interest group.
He sounds like an older Black southern guy or a white guy trying to sound like an older Black southern guy. Either way it sounds very over done and put on.
I don’t know what that is supposed to prove. Of course you cannot tell the race of every single American person just by hearing their voice, but for the majority you can tell if they are Black or white. It is funny how the only people who object to this fact in this thread are not Americans.
I don’t know what the argument is here. It’s absolutely true that among Americans, it’s usually possible to tell an African-American person by es voice.
As someone pointed out above, linguist John McWhorter, himself African-American, has spoken about this. It’s absolutely true.
McWhorter also points out how certain features of his own accent sometimes makes it difficult to tell whether he, in particular, is black or white.
Given that I am the kind of black person who is often termed “articulate,” it may seem surprising that I spend much of my life feeling quite thick of tongue. I am one of those unfortunate black people who sound white. It is, of all things, a social handicap. …
This polarity—between a tragic sense of the world and the ability to make of it a kind of punch line—might help to unshroud, if only slightly, an enigma at the heart of McWhorter’s book. In a chapter on what it means to “sound black,” he is able to isolate several aspects of the “blaccent,” as he calls it—a tendency, for example, to clip certain vowel sounds and luxuriate in others.
Just curious - what ethnicity do you suppose this youtube edutainer is?
[/quote]Assuming you cherry-picked an outlier to try to fool me, I’m not playing.
It’s an outlier, but not “cherry-picked to fool” you. Just to point out that theire are Southern accents that carry the same markers a lot of people perceive as “Black”, even though primarily used by White people.
But refusal to stand by your own statement duly noted.
In other words, seven different Southern accents, including at least one Black accent, that outsiders cannot reliably tell apart. And that’s just where the action of the book takes place.
I agree 100% & I’d add to this that I think one of the problems we have here is that on a personal individual basis it’s hard to get your head around how their algorithms understand those preferences. However, you have to look at this in aggregate.
There are literally billions of videos watched every day and all those video data points are aggregated together and cross-referenced with everything they know about you. And they know pretty much everything about you: who you are, where you live, age, sex, race, gender, marital status, children (& their ages), lots of attitudinal data based on comments & likes, purchases, search history plus also tracking all that for every single one of your contacts, plus plus plus plus.
Big Brother is here and has learned how easy it is to manipulate our thoughts and actions.
I’m not nitpicking - if someone says there’s such a thing as a recognizable Black voice, I’m assuming they mean they would recognize someone as Black even if they were speaking with a non-stereotypical “Blaccent” accent or dialect, like AAVE or one of the South African Black accents. So, for instance, my near-Estuary accent that in no way marks me as PoC (and make no mistake, I’d be Black in America).
If all they’re claiming to do is recognize one of the common Black accents, that’s both believable and trivial (with obvious exceptions that would confound them, like the White Southern accented youtuber I linked to).
I haven’t seen the movie, but in this trailer for Sorry to Bother You Danny Glover gives a young black telemarketer some advice about using his “white voice” if he wants to be successful.
I think also to some degree, the algorithm has been ‘let loose’ - that is, they’ve implemented machine learning that has the objective of making recommendations that result in views, likes, subs, and probably above all of that, ad clickthrough. It’s entirely possible that parts of the algorithm are doing things autonomously that no human completely has a handle on, or at least are not being explicitly invoked by human direction.
Is there anything about the context of my post that would lead you to believe that I meant that black Americans have genetically distinguishable physical vocal structures? If so, then I apologize for the ambiguity. Otherwise, I think it’s clear that I and others are talking about accent and pronunciation and “'voice” is often colloquially used to mean accent and pronunciation, as well as other cultural/social, and not anatomical, characteristics.
Yes. It was the word “voice”. As opposed to the words “accent” or “dialect”. And that was also the way E_0_D seemed to be using it, in the larger thread context. And it’s not just me, N_B also read it that way.