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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."
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.
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."
They call the honest ones female names and the blatantly lying ones male names!
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.
Um akshualy it's spelled "Chodebot."
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: