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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Transcript
Mastodon posts by @trenchworms@eldritch.cafe:
super revealing of the misogyny inherent to the space that "AI assistants" stopped being given feminine-coded names the moment tech chuds thought they were developing higher levels of autonomy
"i TELL Alexa what to do. i COLLABROATE with Chudbot. i will not reflect on this hierarchy at all."
Top level comments on the internet engage in a discussion of misogyny and patriarchy constructively and in good faith challenge:
My wife makes more money than me and I make the sandwiches. Suck it stereotypes
Is it blatant? This feels like they're picking evidence to support the conclusion they already came to
Who has expressed the opinion in that quote they made up?
Siri, Bixby, Majel (Google Assistant), Cortana, Alexa… they are all female names and all had female voices at the beginning. I would say it’s blatant and it has been an ongoing topic of discussion as well.
Bixby is definitely more masculine than feminine. Samsung actually renamed it to Sam (and gave it a feminine avatar) when they made it smarter. Google Assistant was only called Majel internally and very briefly, as a reference to the voice of the Star Trek computer. Externally, it was always Google Assistant until it was replaced with Gemini. Alexa is still Alexa. Siri is still Siri. Cortana was replaced by Copilot. By my count, that's one masc -> fem, one fem -> neutral, one neutral -> neutral, and two unchanged.
Even if we accept your premise, and I am not sure I do, you are still ignoring that they all had female avatars to begin with. So none of them started masc or neutral even if you think the name was.
That has nothing to do with what the post is saying, though. The claim is that techbros stopped using female names because they thought their AI could become sentient. And they're using the "Voice assistants had female names"
Also, how many women named Bixby do you know of?
Purely an anecdote, but one of my colleagues refers to the robot as "Claudette". I insist on not giving it a gender or anthropomorhising it, it's an it, and I'll keep misgendering/deadnaming the robot forever.
I work with a lady who calls ChatGPT Chattiana and says she's her best friend. Decent wordplay, terrible way to live
That's quite sad. I hope their joking :(
Correlation is not causation.
Literally only one AI assistant Im aware of was given a feminine persona out the gate and thats Alexa which is Amazon's.
Every single other one has been purposefully kept gender neutral.
They intentionally gave Siri a gender neutral name ages ago cuz you can pick what its voice sounds like
Same for gemini, copilot, gpt....
Only 1 out of many agents had a female name, and it wasnt "tech bros" that named it.
And only one tool has been given a male name, Claude
cortana was named after the video game AI, which was definitely depicted as female
Yeah but also is a heavy counterpoint to the point in the post, because Cortana was already a "higher level of autonomy" AI in her first depiction (Halo games), from the start, and Microsoft named it after the character because Microsoft bought Halo and was just doing a nod to the character... So thats literally an outright counterpoint to whatever mental gymnastics the poster of the post was doing...
Siri is a girls name, though. In like ten different languages. It was the 12th most popular girls name in 2009, 2 years before Apple launched Siri in 2011. I understand that it was named for SRI, but it was still a feminine name.
The default voice is also fem
As someone who used dude-Siri when I still carried Apple hardware, people always asked why I changed it.
In my experience, GPS voices also tend to be feminine by default.
I think it's less true now than it once was, but I remembering hearing somewhere that pre-recorded messages on trains/subways/in stations tend to use feminine voices for information, and masculine voices for instructions.
There are definitely still times on the London Underground where you'll hear announcements that switch in the middle, and that does usually seem to be the pattern.
(I realise this doesn't really apply to GPSes, but your comment is what reminded me, so. 😅)
Defs true for NSW, Australia railways
Man says "smoking is not permitted", woman says "the next station is foo"
I first noticed as a child and it is one of the first times I remember thinking that society wants women to be servile.
It has been studied that people respond better for gendered voices in those contexts, but yeah that's probably because it's been preprogrammed into people. It's weird when you notice it in the wild.
Not preprogrammed, because patriarchy
but I remembering hearing somewhere that pre-recorded messages on trains/subways/in stations tend to use feminine voices for information, and masculine voices for instructions.
Dunno if this is still the case, but this was definitely true of the subway system in NYC when I lived there.
Female voice: the next stop is [x] street
Male voice: stand clear of the closing doors!
Also, Gemini is decidedly masculine, as it refers to the male twins Castor and Pollux, the plural of the latin geminus.
Etymology is not the same as meaning.
And Alexa was named after the library of Alexandria
Does Bixby count?
It counts as an assistant, and its a gender neutral name cuz its a place name, not a person name.
Its name was specifically chosen to be weird and different to avoid the "accidently triggers in common convo" problem that other assistants tend to have