Comment by GaggiX
2 years ago
>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.
Yeah, upon reflection, I'm not sure if my suggestion is the best.
Just, the default subservient, sexy female assistant doesn't help this technology's inclusivity.
>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.
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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.