Comment by thomashop
2 years ago
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.
I guess I went a bit far with my comment. I don't think one needs to restrict the voices to be only gender-neutral.
But I think the default voice and your first public demos could be gender-neutral these days.
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)?
> To be honest, that HN thread was the first time I saw someone complaining about male and female voices in ChatGPT.
It's the fifth place I've seen it since yesterday. And I haven't been looking. Even my mum sent me a Guardian article about it on Whatsapp.
Daily show: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/51ucQ4s7Crc
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.
> In my opinion, they should have hired a trans person, created a gender-neutral voice, and used that as the default.
Estimates for the percentage of transgender people is between 0.1% and 0.6% of the global population.
OpenAI offers 5 voices. I'd say it's perfectly statistically representative of the population.
Also the voice "Breeze" sounds gender-neutral to me.
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>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.
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That's still going to be either a female or male voice isn't it? Based on the fact that the person providing the voice is either female or male.
> 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.
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.
I recommend you actually try it. While it sounded like this in the demo, it's not actually the default in the app.
The default sounds gender-neutral to me, or at least not very feminine, and it matches your tone, so it's "sexy" if you're being "sexy".
That said I think we all agree the demo was awful.
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