Going Queer! That is the Future of AI Assistants From Now On

Queering AI assistants can end sexist stereotypes and help reimagine their relationship to gender altogether

Nowadays, our virtual and real lives are almost entirely entwined, all thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Boundaries between virtual and real, online and offline, and genders are becoming somewhat blurry. Digital technologies need to be continuously confronted with feminist methodologies of analyzing power structures and one's own potential and agency within. Voice-Activated Artificial Intelligence is increasingly ubiquitous, whether appearing as context-specific conversational assistants or more personalized and generalized personal assistants such as Alexa or Siri. Many users raise substantial concerns around the underlying framing of gender by even well-intentioned developers, the privacy and safety implications of ubiquitous Voice-Activated Artificial Intelligence, and the motivations of the vast for-profit companies that deploy much of this technology. At present, there are two crucial questions related to AI technology: What do we mean by gender bias in artificial intelligence? Why are so many AI assistants female?

In November 2021, the Smithsonian's Futures festival featured Voice-Activated Artificial Intelligence: Q which was first introduced in 2019 as the first "genderless AI voice" is a human voice for use in AI assistants specifically created to be gender-ambiguous.

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Q was intended to begin a discussion around why individuals gender technology when AI technology has no orientation in any case. To plan the voice, a team of language specialists, sound designers, and creatives collaborated with non-binary people and tested various voices to arrive at a sound range they felt could disrupt the status quo and address non-binary individuals in the realm of Artificial Intelligence.

In 2019, when Q was first introduced, it was hailed as "the genderless digital voice the world needs right now," and an affirmation of the damage of feminizing AI assistants, which propagates sexist generalizations of ladies as compliant and devoted. It won acclaim from a United Nations report on gender divides in digital skills. After this, in 2021, Apple disposed of the default "female" voice for Siri, presently including the choice for a male voice and permitting US clients to look over a bunch of voices alluded to as voices 1, 2, and 3. Likewise, Google Assistant and Cortana at present let clients select a male voice, further demonstrating that organizations do respond to public pushback about their products.

However, evacuating the feminization of AI assistants will take something beyond adding a male voice choice to the program. And surprisingly the possibility of a "genderless AI technology" voice that registers somewhere close to what might be generally viewed as manly and ladylike pitch ranges reveals some of the misconceptions people still confront when thinking about ways to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. In particular, Specifically, Q may fortify the obsolete conviction that non-parallel people are neither men nor ladies, but something in the middle of the binary, rather than outside of it. Rather than making progress toward "impartiality," individuals must rethink the fate of the connection between AI assistants and gender altogether.

This exact issue earned a lot of consideration with the launch of Google Duplex, an innovation presently coordinated into Google Assistant, which frightfully mirrors a human voice to execute tasks such as making restaurant reservations or setting up an appointment to get a haircut. Following a large number of allegations expressing the innovation was unscrupulous and "sickening," Google expressed the robot would distinguish itself as such while approaching the sake of clients. In 2019, California became the first state to expect bots to distinguish as such on the web, and however the law has been depicted as empty and profoundly imperfect, in the US, it's the main lawful progression regarding the present situation.

To reconsider the eventual fate of the connection between AI assistants and gender, organizations should seriously investigate the mirror and pose troublesome inquiries regarding how really momentous they will be. As of this second, 75% of experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and data science are male. And it shows. Queering these products might be conceivable assuming diverse women and non-binary people play a significant role in the process of designing them. To consider outside conventional binary boxes, organizations should comprehend that advancement can't exist without any distinction. There are numerous ways forward, and investigating the various conceivable outcomes is exactly the point.