The Talking Lure: Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Reception and the Listening Subjects of American Vocal Biomarker AI.
In the United States, vocal biomarker AI is on the rise. The discourses encircling this interdisciplinary subfield propose that AI can identify discrete biological indicators of mental disability supposedly expressed in the sounds of the voice and detached from the sociocultural dimensions of commun...
| Published in: | Current Anthropology Vol. 67; no. 4; pp. 624 - 645 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
| Format: | Article |
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University of Chicago Press
Aug2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=196037894&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 196037894 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00113204 CUA jtl: Current Anthropology issn: 00113204 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Aug2026 vid: 67 iid: 4 pid: 415 pub: University of Chicago Press artinfo: ui: 196037894 10.1086/741742 ppf: 624 ppct: 21 formats: tig: atl: The Talking Lure: Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Reception and the Listening Subjects of American Vocal Biomarker AI. aug: au: Semel, Beth Michelle Babcock, Joshua Berman, Michael Carr, E. Summerson Ke-Schutte, Jay Seaver, Nick Yeh, Rihan affil: Department of Anthropology, Brown University, 128 Hope Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02906, USA. 13 IX 25 Department of Anthropology, MS 006, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, Massachusetts 02453, USA. 14 IX 25 Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. 18 IX 25 Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310058 P.R. China. 13 IX 25 Department of Anthropology, Tufts University, 110 Eaton Hall, 5 The Green, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA. 19 IX 25 Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive MC 532, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. 16 IX 25 su: United States Racialization Artificial intelligence Racism Mental health services Attention Biometric identification software Computational intelligence sug: subj: Racialization Artificial intelligence Racism Mental health services Attention United States Residential Mental Health and Substance Abuse Facilities Psychiatric and Substance Abuse Hospitals Offices of Mental Health Practitioners (except Physicians) Biometric identification software Computational intelligence ab: In the United States, vocal biomarker AI is on the rise. The discourses encircling this interdisciplinary subfield propose that AI can identify discrete biological indicators of mental disability supposedly expressed in the sounds of the voice and detached from the sociocultural dimensions of communication. Many supporters and makers of vocal biomarker AI claim that AI holds revolutionary potential for American mental health care because it can identify mentally distressed speaking subjects based on these biological-acoustical features alone, without "hearing" any other categories of difference, such as race. Drawing from fieldwork with a lab that crafted an anthropomorphic agent for their vocal biomarker–detecting prototype, I deploy the analytic of the "talking lure" to demonstrate that racialization can coexist alongside, and indeed even materially enable, ideologies of AI's race-evasive listening. Members of the lab at once enacted, depended on, and somewhat underplayed the significance of various processes of racialization that shaped the foundations of their technology's AI model. By tracing the racialized and gendered hierarchies of listening and auditory personhood that were assembled and disassembled across the lab's technology development pipeline, I outline and challenge vocal biomarker AI's implicit theorization of race as an internal auditory signal that lies in wait to be either identified or disentangled from disability. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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