We Need a New Pronoun for AI
Deep inside a spaghetti bowl of suburban Maryland streets this weekend, I turned to a trusted guide for directions back to the highway. But this guide couldn’t figure out what direction we were going, and she asked me to perform nonsensical maneuvers. “Actually, don’t listen to Siri—she can’t figure out where we are,” said a friend in the passenger seat. Referring to Apple’s artificial-intelligence (AI) assistant as “she” feels natural because of Siri’s female-sounding voice. Although Siri herself will tell you she is neither male nor female—“I exist beyond your human concept of gender”—her relatively natural-sounding voice elicits a warmer response than a stilted robot voice would. There’s an option buried in every iPhone to make Siri speak in a male-sounding voice (or in a British or an Australian accent),…
Link to Full Article: We Need a New Pronoun for AI
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