Thinking about this from a biological perspective since both male and female participants had the same behavior... I wonder if its because the earliest voices most people ever hear are those of their mothers, while still in utero. After birth, we primarily will hear our mothers' voice while breastfeeding. Even the most well intentioned and involved dad probably doesn't get nearly so much voice time with a little one. I wonder if humans are especially attuned to feeling the uncanny valley with female voices over male because of all that early exposure? So, the female agent voices are perceived as "lower quality"?

Strike one, which is just shitty journalism: The linked news article doesn't link to the study. So no, this here slashdot article isn't putting out a paper that spells out what they did.

The University of Limerick has a page dedicated to it which links to the actual paper.

Go for it.

After all, women go for more decidely female-related professions such as female doctor, female surgeon, female attorney, or female director.

Of course the AI versions would get paid less.

This. No good game was ever created from a single prompt. Not to an AI, not a human development team. Every single person writing those damn "look which game my AI built from a single prompt and $x in tokens!" postings is a newbie and almost certainly has never actually shipped a single game.

Game development can be summed up as endless iterations. Every system you build, every visual you create, every sound, text, button, movement, weapon, skill, powerup needs polishing, refinement and changes. It is never, never good enough the first time.

No it is not, but it IS a very successful platform for a specific subclass of games. If I were in it for the money, I could probably AI refactor some of my earliest games and publish them on Roblox and make a quick buck. If your thing is the kind of games you played on your C64 back in 1793, then Roblox got you covered. Well, if you ignore the scams and money-grabbing.

*sigh* I wish Unity would actually complete some of their dozens half-finished sub-systems instead of constantly chasing the latest trend. It's become really, really annoying. The engine used to be really good. These days, it falls apart if you look at it the wrong way, and at least from the responses to my bug reports it's clear that fixing issues is way down on the agenda.

Maybe this is their attempt to regain grounds in the indie game market - the very market they pushed away by focussing on AAA requirements for years and ignoring the single devs and small teams. If so, I can already tell them that it won't work. We collectively laugh about all the "look what my AI built for me from a single prompt" postings on reddit, where people proudly show off some AI slop that would get them last place at a game jam.

Their AI efforts so far: Tried to build and sell their own AI tools, to a collective yawn from the audience. Built a barely-working MCP server, then deprecated it before it was even finished in order to push a CLI interface to the editor instead, which only works if it's run as the same user as the editor on the same machine. And completely ignores every single advise on workflows and good development practices you can think of.

Unity, I love your engine, I despise your management. Please return to when you were actually good and stop chasing butterflies.

The target audience for this particular rule of the AI Act isn't the producers or users of AI. It is the consumers of content that might be AI generated.

And frankly, letting people know if they see AI content or not is a fair thing to ask.

Fun fact: The EU AI Act considers this. It makes a difference between "AI generated" and "AI modified".

But it's hard to put this into the type of watermarking they are using. Because if you generate a text and then change a few things here and there what you are doing is degrading the watermark. But since the watermark is probabilistic, it's hard to tell if it was a weak watermark from the start or if it was degraded.

I don't think that makes the document any less your own than having a human copy editor conduct a similar review which has been done since forever.

Which is what I've been saying as well. If all you're doing is asking for suggestions to something you have already written, using AI is no different than using a human editor. It's your work. It's been written. You're just looking for advice on how to improve it.

This is completely different than people who tell AI what they want and it does all the work.

That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

The dependence on "AI" is the danger because it's incredibly stupid, and officers are not very smart. They need solid foundational training to favors innocence. They do get a lot of that, and it's almost always bad laws that lead to these situations (including the entire war on drugs).

Flock is a big problem here because it is clearly violating the 4th amendment. You can say "they're in public" and sure .. that's true. But when you start doing deep analytics automatically on everyone in "public," it's more than just a CCTV to keep a record or someone taking a photo of people walking through the park. It becomes indexed and searchable: surveillance. That's illegal search, which in this case lead to illegal search and seizure.

Gun sale records are not allowed to be indexed and searchable by name (they can be by a gun store. But if they go out of business and send an Excel spreadsheet in to the ATF, it has to be printed out and stored on paper or microfilm).

I hope this woman gets at least a million after taxes and legal fees for this fuck up. I hope the woman from TN gets a few million for her six months of detention in North Dakota. TN should have never remanded her. Both states failed to protect the people in that case. She lost her fucking house!

This is all about getting us to have warm fuzzy feelings for our Flock protectors. Probably so we are willing to report the vile criminals who vandalize them to steal the valuable metals and precious SSD, HDD and memory components inside.

Yep. It's for security.... but not YOUR security. It's to let others be secure from the user. The "trust" part of the TPM isn't there to let you trust the computer, it's so others can trust it. Or, in this case, build up a database of who not to trust.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

So cancel every contract Flock has with any government organization, and remove them from government / public property, and this problem is solved.

It's so great we can be in agreement.

Indeed. Who controls all 3 branches of government?

Jews?

You don't get it.

Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.

Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.