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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
sandwiches can also be a paid skill, earning a lot of money in a sandwich truck in a major metropolis, but usually domestic skills like these are ignored and unpaid. what a shame.
If you're not profit-maxing your sandwich making skills are you even living??
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.
I’m torn on this because there definitely is a worrying increase in bigotry and tech bro culture, but at the same time OP’s “it’s so blatant once you notice it” could just as easily be “it’s so blatant once you’ve adopted confirmation bias enough to handwave away the exceptions”.
The evidence is obviously if you decide on the conclusion before looking for it
It's interesting you cite that article, because it was written in 2018 and presented feminist arguments that we should stop making AI assistants female-coded. Now that the industry has done that exact thing, it's being criticized for it? It looks a lot of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Tbf, Cortana stems from a fictional AI that has far higher levels of autonomy. I don't think it was chosen with "let's find a good name for a limited AI interface" in mind.
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" thing as "evidence"
Also, how many women named Bixby do you know of?
Also people absolutely tell ChatGPT and Grok and whatever what to do
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
Siri's default voice is female and all of the early advertising used that same female presentation.
Cortana was female.
I didn't know if Google's original voice assistant had a name, but it's voice was also distinctly female — and still is, Google maps (and other android apps with voice assistance, probably) continues to use that same voice.
Here are my rules for avoiding companies/services based on name:
Follow these rules and you'll avoid 90% of slop. Not specifically AI slop, human slop too.
no baby talk? ;(
Not from corporations :3
This is an extremely American English-centric take. The gendering of robot assistants varies widely across different cultures. It’s a heavily studied topic with lots written down for you to learn from. But you’re not intellectually curious, you’re just ignorant and want to make up pseudo-scientific crap to fit your preconceived biases.
Shitty way to say it, but you’re right. I used to work on mobile industrial robots, the sorts of machines that deliver parts in factories, clean rooms, semiconductor fabs, etc. These are industrial machines and have about as much gender as an office printer. We sold them in countries all over the world. At some point we added an off the shelf text to speech library so that to robots could communicate with non-technical people and say things like, “Excuse me” or “I’m lost”. It supported a bunch of languages and could use a male or female voice.
People in different countries had shockingly strong opinions about what gender the voice should have. The US, Canada, France and UK customers wanted them to be female. Germany and the Spanish speaking countries wanted male. Korea and China wanted male IIRC, but Japan insisted on female.
I’m sure this says something about the culture in all of those places, but I have no idea what.
American take: computer voices should be female because the higher pitch is easier to understand in an environment with any significant background noise.
Middle-aged guy take: Computer voices should be medium pitched because we’ve lost too much of our high pitched hearing due to concerts and working in noisy environments.
Grumpy middle-aged guy take: Computers shouldn’t talk to me. If I want get information from one, I’ll use a terminal like Turing intended.
I mean I've seen Japanese porn too but women who aren't pretending to have pixelated orgasms don't speak that high pitched.
Did Alan Turing live to see a terminal, or did the limeys Conservative him to death before the first interactive UI?
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 :(
The correct pronoun to use was always "it".
Um akshualy it's spelled "Chodebot."