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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
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."
The correct pronoun to use was always "it".
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.
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?
I think the first full terminal was the hard copy terminal for the Wirlwind 1 in 1956. So he missed it by two years. Fucking hell.
A little aggressive in your point, but i do recall hearing of a study about this. Being nice to people goes a long way in getting people to be receptive to your argument.
Wat. Link some studies please.
Do the LLM chatbot things have "higher levels of autonomy" than the mobile voice assistants?
To a voice assistant: "Set my alarm for 7 AM." "Start a 5 minute timer." "Play Kind Of A Drag by the Buckinghams"
To an LLM: "Create a deepfake video of a public figure precisely supporting my political opinions."
It’s ‘collabroate’ when the oblique complement of the verb is masculine. It’s ‘collabriate’ when the complement is feminine.
This may be the first attestation of object gender agreement in English
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
Jokes on you, cooking is considered masculine in other cultures; you are just living up to the stereotypes. /nsrs
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??
Um akshualy it's spelled "Chodebot."
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.
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.
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
Point of order: Sam is gender neutral (we had a GirlSam and BoySam in our drama group in college, and GirlSam was there first (also won in the rock paper scissors to see who kept the name) so BoySam was BoySam and GirlSam was Sam unless we needed to be really specific in conversations)
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.