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posted by martyb on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the voices-carry dept.

United Nations: Siri and Alexa Are Encouraging Misogyny

We already knew humans could make biased AIs — but the United Nations says the reverse is true as well.

Millions of people talk to AI voice assistants, such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. When those assistants talk back, they do so in female-sounding voices, and a new UN report argues that those voices and the words they're programmed to say amplify gender biases and encourage users to be sexist — but it's not too late to change course.

The report is the work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and its title — "I'd blush if I could" — is the response Siri was programmed in 2011 to give if a user called her a "bitch."

[...] "It is a 'Me Too' moment," Saniye Gülser Corat, Director of UNESCO's Division for Gender Equality, told CBS News. "We have to make sure that the AI we produce and that we use does pay attention to gender equality."

Also at CNET.

[Back in 2013 in Germany, Siri's voice could be selected as either male or female.

Possibly one of the earliest and best-known "computer voices" was that of Majel Barrett from ST:TOS, although a case could be made for HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. --Ed.]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Sunday May 26 2019, @06:51PM (8 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday May 26 2019, @06:51PM (#847943) Homepage
    If the voice is female, that's bad because it's implying these female assistants are subservient.
    If the voice is male, that's bad because it's implying these males are experts we refer to.

    Anyone involved with this report should just go kill itself.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:10PM (7 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:10PM (#847945) Homepage Journal

    I've been looking over a bit more of the report and it looks to me like that Siri thing is just a sort of click-baity talking point to draw attention to the report, which goes onto analyze and discuss gender disparity in ICT, with quite a lot of supporting data. Looks like their click bait worked.

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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:21PM (6 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:21PM (#847948)

      Why is the UN publishing a report that makes assumptions about gender in 2019?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:25PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:25PM (#847949)

        Apparently, there are no lives to save or wars to stop.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:58PM (4 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:58PM (#847967)

          Hear me out, I think I know what's going on and the crowd around here will like it:

          1. Get people to understand their misogyny
          2. People stop being misogynistic because it's bad for profits or whatever else they value
          3. Women like the men in power more because they aren't such assholes anymore
          4. Men in power too focused on all the great sex they're having now to commit genocide

          (and if you don't think you can have great sex when your partner is an equal, soon enough we'll have sex robots for you - better for the rest of us if you take yourselves off the market)

          • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:14PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:14PM (#848009)

            I think it has to do more with the fact that denying lies is almost always exclusively a guy thing.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:57PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:57PM (#848026)

            +1 fantasyLand

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:49PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:49PM (#848037)

            Seems more likely the UN has gone to contract Peace Keeper robots, ala Elysium, and found that not one comes with a Californian/Austrian accent. I mean even ED209 would be a huge leap over Siri. What would you do if a 20ft Siri was standing in front of you in a DMZ telling you to comply?

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @06:13AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 27 2019, @06:13AM (#848113) Journal

            3. Women like the men in power more because they aren't such assholes anymore

            I have a Godwin's Law variant here that I think is appropriate. I call it "Hitler got laid".

            I don't think anyone here really is that clueless about human nature. Sure, there's plenty of decent, honorable people in the world, but there's also plenty of people who don't make that standard.