Comment by msoad
2 years ago
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
2 years ago
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
They're clearly trying to imitate human interaction, and believe it or not, the vast majority of humans have genders they're perfectly happy with.
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.
https://www.tiktok.com/@openlynews/video/7260846856228326682...
If you're interested in her voice
> 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.
I'd love a glados voice or a extremely synthesized one 80s style. I'm using an open one for now, and I think it's very appropriate.
I wouldn't be surprised if the person voicing those announcements would be more happy to be called female than gender neutral.
She's trans, so probably yes. But in an interview she says she is very happy to having been chosen as the gender-neutral voice of Berlin's subway.
What is a gender neutral voice? Something that is interpolated between a male and a female voice?
https://www.ted.com/talks/nis_norgaard_how_to_create_a_gende...
It sounds genuinely bad though.
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?
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Why?
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.
Sometimes the Guardian goes a bit far but OpenAI could have avoided this kind of article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/1...
(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.
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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)?
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> Because assigning genders to computers makes as much sense as giving your toaster a name
For whatever historical reason, the majority of Indo-European languages assign genders to nouns, so apparently it does make some sense.
Also, I'm offended on behalf of all Cylons.
> 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".
> A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.
How do you manage to be annoyed when they offer both male and female voices?
I think you're the problem here buddy.
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