“a “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke famously said. And this is certainly true of his impressive OpenAI update to ChatGPT, released on Monday, called GPT-4o. I would like to add a few caveats: this magician felt like a newly born naughty 12-year-old boy. I watched the Spike Jonze movie “Her”.
If you’re not familiar with GPT-4o (the o stands for “omni”), it’s basically an all-singing, all-dancing, all-seeing version of the original chatbot. You can now interact with them the same way you would interact with a human, rather than text-based questions. It can give you advice, rate your jokes, explain your surroundings, and joke with you.I can hear it human. “It feels like an AI in a movie,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in the article. Monday blog post. “Achieving human-level response times and expressiveness proved to be a game-changer.”
hasn’t disappeared without being noticed When Altman says “cinematic AI,” he seems to be referring to the 2013 film “Her.” In many demonstrations, the bot’s voice sounds like this: Looks a lot like Johansson. And after Monday’s OpenAI event, Altman tweeted: One word: “she”.
There’s nothing wrong with giving a chatbot a voice like Johansson from Her. What’s a little strange, though, is that the chatbot is oddly flirtatious and coquettish. Some demo videos of the chatbot (i.e. videos helping new dads) use a male voice; practice dad jokes), many demo videos feature a voice similar to Johansson’s, including one in which she helps people prepare for an interview. strangely fascinating.
“Am I the only one who feels sick at how frivolous it is?” Engineer Nick St. Pierre Asked Link to the interview preparation video on Twitter/X. Judging by the reaction to his tweet, that wasn’t the case.
The frivolity of GPT-4o was glossed over by many male-written articles about this release, but Palmy Olson addressed the issue head-on in her next article. Bloomberg article Headline that making ChatGPT “sexy” may not end well for humans.
“What are the social and psychological effects of regularly speaking to a flirty, fun, and ultimately pleasant artificial voice on a mobile phone, and then encountering completely different power relations between men and women? Will it be? In real life? ” asks Olson.
OpenAI did not respond when Olson asked that question. But there was no need. There is no need to hypothesize about the outcome of giving GPT-4o the ability to sound like a submissive young woman who will attend to your every need. Because there’s already a lot of data on this. We’ve long debated the social impact of female-voiced voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
For example, in 2018, University of Southern California sociology professor Safiya Umoja Noble warned that the gender of an assistant’s voice can have an impact. how we talk to them. Noble told New York Magazine that virtual assistants are “increasing command-based speech for women’s voices.” “Siri, find me” [fill in the blank]” So, for example, children might learn what they can do while playing with smart devices. It is a powerful socialization tool that teaches women, girls, and gendered people about their on-demand roles. ”
2019 UNESCO Report I echoed Noble’s warning. “Most voice assistants are voiced by women, so women are friendly, obedient, and willing to please helpers available at the push of a button or with straightforward voice commands like “hey” or “ok.” It’s sending a signal that it’s there. ” the report said.
What’s important to note here is that these voice assistants don’t just send signals about gender norms, they do so at scale. For example, a UNESCO report describes Apple’s Siri as “not a genderless robot, but a sassy young woman who likes to deflect insults and flatter and serve users with playful submissiveness. It debuted as a.'' This technology was used in approximately 150 million iPhones that Apple sold from late 2011 to 2012. This singular technology was developed behind closed doors by one company in one state of one country, with little input from a woman, and she is trying to explain what an AI assistant is and should be. It shaped global expectations. In just 15 months. ” And in fact, you can draw a direct line from Siri’s personality to her flirtatious girlfriend GPT-4o.
The 2019 UNESCO report included a call to action. “The world needs to pay closer attention to how, when and how AI technologies are gendered, and most importantly, who genders them.” said Sanye Gürsel Korat, Director of Gender Equality at UNESCO.
Big tech companies have paid lip service to this and started Recruitment Voice assistants give you more masculine voice options. Still, the new and improved “sexy” version of ChatGPT seems to make it clear that no one at OpenAI is particularly interested in the gendering of AI technology and its implications. This may be because the company is dominated by men. There are single women I joined the board for a few months. (They appointed three women ) That may be because of board members like economist and former Harvard University president Larry Summers. famous He downplayed discrimination and suggested that men were better at math and science than women due to biological differences. (He later apologized.) Or maybe it’s because he’s too lazy to think about things like gender. It just doesn’t interest them.
Despite all the talk about how revolutionary ChatGPT is and how it will change the world, it feels like nothing has changed when it comes to misogyny in technology. It’s frustrating that we’re still having the same conversations about bias in digital technology for more than a decade. It’s infuriating that some of the highest-paid people in the world, who are regularly hailed as the greatest minds of their generation, still seem oblivious to gender norms and the role they play in perpetuating them. . We keep being told that OpenAI is building the future, but we’re not sure if our sexy girlfriend ChatGPT is making any progress.
Source: www.theguardian.com
