Berlin famously casted a gender neutral voice for public transport announcements. It would be nice if OpenAI would have done that too. At least for one of the options. Computers better not have genders imo
Well, but it is not a human. It's a talking computer and trying to sound not like a computer is disingenuous, creepy and heavily misleading. The movie "her" made a good point about that.
I actually think the movie "Her" showed us the opposite - people feel comfortable with their computer sounding like a human. Almost every character in the film finds it near natural.
> Berlin famously casted a gender neutral voice for public transport announcements.
The person in question is transsexual. You're saying that regular men and women aren't neutral but transsexuals are?
> Computers better not have genders imo
This doesn't make any sense. Gender is an intrinsic part of many languages which cannot be ripped out. It's impossible to talk in some languages without picking a way of speaking which is either masculine or feminine.
It's from 4 years ago so I assume the quality could be much better, but it still feels a lot less natural than to talk with a "gendered" voice.
I also don't really understand the problem of having only gendered voices. It's not YOUR voice, GPT-4 isn't speaking in your place, it's another entity that has its own voice.
Do you ask people to speak with a gender neutral voice? If not how is that different?
Yeah, it's not great. I just thought it was interesting someone tried.
I don't know how I got myself into the position in this argument but where I'm coming from is a sexy female voice as the default for a voice assistant seems old-fashioned to me.
It feels like a lot of products are designed by white males and they represent their fantasies and desires. The customers are more diverse than the people designing the products and companies should be mindful of that.
Because assigning genders to computers makes as much sense as giving your toaster a name, it’s 2024, so why not keep the gender out of it?
The why question is easily answered if you see how many negative reactions their choice of voice caused. A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.
I'm happy if advertising stops hitting the sexy/cliched stereotypes.
(Edit: I guess I was being slightly inflammatory with my first sentence. I think the default voice should be gender-neutral and then let the user choose what makes them happy. I don't think it was clever of OpenAI to use a sexy female as the default voice in their demos as evidenced by us having this discussion)
>Because assigning genders to computers makes as much sense as giving your toaster a name, it’s 2024, so why not keep the gender out of it?
The goal of a tool is to be used by someone, and if the interface is the voice that the user can interact with it makes sense that it should ultimately be up to the user's preferences how the voice will sound like.
I see the fact that they're aiming for gender-neutral voice as yet another ludicrous attempt to advertise their advocation for inclusiveness which, while I'm in favor, I think has manifestations that go well past benefiting the original intention. Examples: Main over Master branch on git repositories, Latinx, removing "blind playthrough" on Twitch.tv because it indicates ableism, and so on.
I don't mind having some voice selections out of the box, but if they're gonna restrict my options and ability to change them to fit my preferences then I do mind. Our primal brain (lizard/monkey, or whatever tag you feel like assigning) will always perceive voice interaction as "talking to someone else", so why not just let the user choose who they talk to? It's a tool, for the user's needs. There's no need with appropriate ascribing of a gender to a tool, because it's not a human or anything living.
My 4-year-old son didn't give our toaster a name, but he did give our robot vacuum a name. And it's just a moving gadget with some prerecorded voices.
ChatGPT, a system designed to deal with human language and answer in a way similar to a human, will surely be anthropomorphized, and many people will want it to have male or female voices.
Gender neutral should definitely exist as an option, it makes a lot of sense, but I don't see why it should be the only option.
They would have annoyed less people if the accents weren't so American and quirky. Google Maps has had a female voice since like forever and I don't remember any outrage.
>The why question is easily answered if you see how many negative reactions their choice of voice caused.
To be honest, this HN thread was the first time I saw someone complaining about male and female voices in ChatGPT.
>A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.
The voice actors and actresses hired by OpenAI use their natural voices for training, I don't understand how that could be annoying to anyone, is the problem that they didn't hire a trans person (I imagine they have a more neutral voice)?
In my opinion, they should have hired a trans person, created a gender-neutral voice, and used that as the default. It would not have caused a backlash to the voices.
>Even my mum sent me a Guardian article about it on Whatsapp.
I'm assuming you're trans and you follow or know people who seem to really care about these issues. I think you might be deeply biased, I search for the ChatGPT voice on Google and no one really seems to care about it in a negative way, if there was an actual backlash I would be able to find it easily.
>In my opinion, they should have hired a trans person, created a gender-neutral voice, and used that as the default.
I think the vast majority of the population would find it more natural to have a female or male voice. I also believe that people should be hired for their skills, not their gender.
I agree that hiring should be based on skills. Creating a gender-neutral voice option in ChatGPT isn't about excluding male and female voices but promoting inclusivity. Offering a neutral voice by default helps avoid gendered stereotypes and makes technology feel more accessible and less biased.
Couldn't the fact that most ChatGPT developers are white, cis-male, and affluent introduce bias that one needs to actively work against to ensure a more inclusive and representative technology? Given historical discrimination, we need to elevate underrepresented voices to even the playing field.
>Offering a neutral voice by default helps avoid gendered stereotypes
I think the problem lies with a small group of people online who always see malice first, if the AI has a female voice then it's because people think women are submissive, if the AI has a male voice then it would be the patriarchy, the AI can tell you where to go for example. Some people who want to complain will always find a way to complain, there is nothing wrong with having a female or male voice as the default one.
>most ChatGPT developers are white, cis-male
White and cis doesn't really surprise me, since most of the US is white and cis; Sam Altmam is gay, if this sort of thing actually matters. The smaller presence of women in STEM disciplines is noticeable; for some reason, all of my female friends seem to care far less about computers, probably some bias at portraiting hackers as men in the media or something (even though the vast majority of hackers are indeed men), it's like the chicken or egg dilemma.
Like I said, I think the vast majority of the population would find it more natural to have a female or male voice. Also, it's not like everyone in your minority actually cares, I have a few friends who are trans, I doubt they care about the ChatGPT voice. I understand not wanting an overly sexualized voice, but even a male or female voice, I don't get it.
> Because assigning genders to computers makes as much sense as giving your toaster a name
I don't know if you speak a language with genders, I assume you don't. A computer personality needs a gender in some languages in order to talk naturally about itself.
For example, if it needs to answer a question with "I'm not sure." In Romanian it would say "Nu-s sigur." for a male personality or "Nu-s sigură." for female. There is no other option.
> it’s 2024
You know a position is bad when it's justified by "it's current year".
I was referring to the default being a sexy female. Maybe it makes sense because the majority of users are male but I guess that's what I'd like to see change.
Totally. I may have gone a bit far in my wording, but what irritated me was the cringy demos, not the actual app.
I basically spend more time talking to ChatGPT than humans these days when I'm not on holiday. I'm in no way opposed to it.
I don't know why, but I always end up going down the devil's advocate route without even realizing it. And then I find myself arguing positions that I don't even agree with. But it's interesting.
