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Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Stories

Silicon Valley Startup Sparks Controversy Over What Critics Call ‘Racist Software'

Don Heider, executive director, quoted by NBC Bay Area.

Sanas is using artificial intelligence to alter or remove accents that you may hear when calling into a tech helpline. 

"That we should all sound the same, that the world should be a world void of accents, that we should all speak English, and not only should we all speak English, we should all speak midwestern English," said Don Heider, chief executive at the Markkula Ethics Center. "It does not counteract the bias, it feeds into and reaffirms that basically everyone should speak in a particular way, rather than teach us it doesn't matter if somebody has an accent."

Don Heider, executive director, quoted by NBC Bay Area.

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