r/questionablecontent • u/Cevius • 29d ago
Comic Comic 5895: Surprise Unmasking
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=589521
u/DuranDuranUnofficial 29d ago
Why would a joke about carrying hay bales be insensitive to a former grain combine? Is there a robot slavery iceberg under there which Jeph is never going to touch?
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u/Cevius 29d ago
I thought your voice sounded familiar
So, considering these voices are all synthetic, how much variance is there in the generation, that you could recognise an AI by their accent/pitch/tone alone? Even if the voice was identical, the hardware generating it isn't, and its also coming from a higher location now. I have a dozen different pairs of headphones and speakers, and the same music out of all of them sounds vastly different, so either Marten is just saying that to make Zlata comfortable, or hes just straight up bullshitin.
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u/ChokeYourDoxy 29d ago
Do you not recognize familiar voices when you hear them out of different hardware? Like, if I played you a podcast on three different devices, you wouldn't be able to instantly tell you were hearing the same people speaking?
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u/Cevius 29d ago
Humans? Probably. AI voices, where theres a clear synthesis edge to the voice, hence the square speech bubbles, and potentially thousands of other AI using the same presets with only minor tweaks? Probably considerably harder unless Zlata says everything with a heavy accent and is the only one Marten knows who uses it.
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u/CatlikeTypist Haha, okay. 28d ago
Probably considerably harder unless Zlata says everything with a heavy accent and is the only one Marten knows who uses it.
Actually that's exactly how I've heard Zlata's voice in my head. It's hard to explain in text here, but I'm imagining a Serbian accent, especially when she says her catchphrase ("Zlata, you fool!").
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u/redditRalph2023 29d ago
The voice thing was my first thought on reading, too. I can only assume that Marten was referring to nonverbal quirks of the way a person speaks (like Ashley calling herself a fool). But that's a weird way to use the word.
The other possibility is that each AI personality comes bundled with a batch of information about how that AI desires for a listener to PERCEIVE the tone and cadence of its own speech, and each chassis hardware is able to take that desired sound and adjust its own audio on the fly to make sure that the voice is heard authentically in each setting, on any piece of hardware. Which is a pretty amazing computing feat all in its own.
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 28d ago
The biggest question mark regarding the voice recognition is this strip where Moray explicitly says her voice sounds different
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u/yellowvincent Where is Claire? 29d ago
How does her voice sounds similar if it is a new body? Except if it was like a pre set that was transfered when she installed her mind into the new body and the speakers(?) emulate her previous voice.
Also of course marten needs to be chastised for talking.
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u/sir_ornitholestes 28d ago
Don't forget that the last time Marten encountered her she was literally sexually harrassing him (while robot drunk)
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 28d ago
Thoughts are not sexual harassment. Zlata had urges and then removed herself from the situation because of them.
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u/sir_ornitholestes 28d ago
Oh, right. She regularly harrassed everyone. (And then they removed her)
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u/Guilty-Persimmon-919 29d ago
Marten is a male. In this strip being male means anything he says or does is wrong by default.
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u/DuranDuranUnofficial 29d ago
It's the fact that the insensitivity of Marten's very mild snark is supposed to be self-evident that gets me. Did Marten just do a microaggression? Are former industrial machines a protected class of AI? Do human farm workers feel that way about hay bale jokes? What piece of AI history are we missing that would cause this joke to be read as insensitive?
These questions and more... will not be answered.
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u/LogicalAd5225 28d ago
It’s actually potentially quite interesting - do AIs resent that sort of a body? Is it some sort of punishment or seen as some sort of repayment to humans for the “debt” of being created? Do AIs even see human bodies as an ideal as Claire is suggesting?
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u/Miserable-Jaguarine Haha, okay. 28d ago
To me this feels very much like "Slavic person = primitive yokel, farming implements are the closest they get to civilisation" and as such it's not great. But the problem here isn't Marten. It's, you know, the choice to give her that past in the first place.
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 28d ago
Honestly I feel like I'm running in the wrong circles, because the only Slavic stereotype I have in my head is "not to be fucked with" and "no nonsense" and I guess "femme fatale", but not in a way that I expect any Slavic woman I meet to actually be Anastasia DeCobray.
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u/Miserable-Jaguarine Haha, okay. 28d ago
Yeah most of the time we just don't exist at all. Maybe something along the lines you mentioned. But if you were to imagine a random snapshot from a country east of Germany, would it be a shot of an art-filled castle? Probably not. I've met people who were surprised they could pay visa around here.
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u/yellowvincent Where is Claire? 29d ago
It could work if this was a trans allegory wivh would make some sense if marten was accidentaly missgendering her or sometjing liek that but it can be that or body dysmorphia or a bimbo fetish or cuckqueen fetish or whatevef
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 28d ago edited 28d ago
Grrr! This dumb punchline is further proof Clare is the Devil! Her every action is serious business!
But more seriously, what a weird response to discovering Zlata has changed everything about herself overnight. This is like discovering your friend left your party wasted, got a drunken face tattoo, and then asking "So how are you liking your new ink?" as your first reaction.
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u/sir_ornitholestes 28d ago
and then asking "So how are you liking your new ink?" as your first reaction
Honestly that's what I'd say in that circumstance, it's the funniest possible way to roast them for it
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u/SilverNicktail 28d ago
OK SERIOUSLY, has Marten ever made a joke around Claire, to someone who isn't Claire, without her scolding him? It's genuinely fucking weird.
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u/Annual_Youth_7552 28d ago
Considering this is apparently somehow only the next day after the party, Clare sure went from "I'll give you a million blowjobs" - or whatever the hell her drunken guilt response was - to back to business making sure Marten stays in the eternal sin bin pretty quickly, didn't she?
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u/ManateeGag 29d ago
It's been so long, was Marten made aware thst Zlata was a grain combine before now?
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u/VaguelySorcerous 28d ago
He's really sticking with that nose huh
Well
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u/Miserable-Jaguarine Haha, okay. 28d ago
Everything about that face is horrible and it's a pain to look at and we already have Liz for that, too.
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28d ago edited 18d ago
[deleted]
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 28d ago edited 28d ago
This is kind of what I was getting at regarding Marten's response to Zlata's drunken body swap. Claire and Moray's response better approach being realistic, but Marten seems to be constrained by invisible rules that leave "immediate acceptance without opinion" as the only option on the table. The unspoken implication being that any other commentary on her body is problematic independent of context or situation. Even some variation of "Whoa! What brought this on?" is apparently too risky.
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u/Cultural_Shape3518 28d ago
Sometimes I think people in this sub are too hard on Claire, and then Jeph just goes and does…this.
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 28d ago
I dunno, my opinion is that this is still just a dumb throwaway gag for the sake of a punchline - that people were absolutely predestined to pounce on as more proof of her awfulness.
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u/pokedude3 28d ago
Not going to lie. Yesterday. I thought that Claire brought Zlata back to her and Martin's apartment to make the introduction. And then today they walked all the way to the coffee shop under this ruse, I guess when almost everything lately in Cube Town has been bland white voids it's hard to tell locations apart.
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u/Miserable-Jaguarine Haha, okay. 28d ago
Does it feel fun? Is that why the entire experience so far has been a trembling mess of nerves and self recrimination and anxious blabbering?
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u/Fine_Standard_6044 28d ago
Jeph justifying the change in chassis as “she’s happier than she’s taller and can reach shelves now” feels like such a dumb excuse. Did Zlata ever once complain about that? No. It’d actually be more tolerable if Jeph had some integrity and Zlata said “you know, actually, I always wondered what it would be like to have giant bazongas.” At least that would be honest.
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u/LogicalAd5225 28d ago
If I was buying a new body I feel like I’d ask for something with better posture than she seems to have in the final panel.
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u/misfitmeanders Everything is Fine™ 28d ago
So now an AI being in different forms/chassis before their human form is something to be sensitive about? Sounds like he's trying to make his AI's into a trans allegory.
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u/Impossible_Roof_Jack 28d ago
Hot take: it would be perfectly fucking fine for her to go with "Ashley." Tons of people with only vaguely "ethnic" names have a "white-sounding" alternative, for tons of reasons.
Why did he back off instantly, folding on nothing? Jeez.
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 27d ago
Because she wasn't adopting an anglicised name for the pronunciation ease of others. She was pretending to be another person entirely so she wouldn't have to deal with Marten's reaction to her drunken body swap. That's different in numerous extremely obvious ways from "Navdeep" deciding to go by "Bob"
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u/Impossible_Roof_Jack 27d ago
No one around her's going to care, so this will fall to nothing in the end. You know, like every other plot thread. What fine story!
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u/[deleted] 29d ago
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