Transcript
Mastodon posts by @[email protected]:
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.”
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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.
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
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.
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”.
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)
Samsung’s Sam is not gender-neutral, however.
