Transcript
Mastodon posts by @trenchworms@eldritch.cafe:
super revealing of the misogyny inherent to the space that "AI assistants" stopped being given feminine-coded names the moment tech chuds thought they were developing higher levels of autonomy
"i TELL Alexa what to do. i COLLABROATE with Chudbot. i will not reflect on this hierarchy at all."
It's interesting you cite that article, because it was written in 2018 and presented feminist arguments that we should stop making AI assistants female-coded. Now that the industry has done that exact thing, it's being criticized for it? It looks a lot of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Okay, imagine a company is being criticized because it only hires woman as secretaries.
So they change their policy to never hire women.
Kinda misses the point.
That analogy doesn’t even slightly work. AIs now are called ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Llama, Perplexity, Meta AI, DeepSeek… all genderless names. Only one, Claude, has a male name.
Even then, Claude can also be a woman's name in some cultures.
Replacing the secretaries with genderless chatbots still misses the point.
What is your point then?
Your analogy is falling apart even more since it’s now mixing up the idea of a real secretary being replaced with a bot except in the analogy the real secretary was also a bot…?
Honestly it reads like you just want to be offended.
In the analogy the secretary was gendered as a woman, and now it has been degendered as a bot.
Why did it happen that specific way? Perhaps they saw the criticism of all their bots having women's names, but why was their solution to remove gendered names almost entirely? Why don't we see a mix of men's and women's names, instead of only Claude?
Siri and Alexa are still around. As I said in another comment, you have to really be hanging onto a ton of confirmation bias to do this much ignoring of the examples that don’t fit your conclusion.
Those are legacy bots, from before things changed. The new bots are genderless or Claude. Why is that?
Why won't you interrogate this question even slightly?
I’ve interrogated it plenty, I just don’t agree with the unsubstantiated implication that the trend towards genderless naming is driven by misogyny.
There’s plenty of real misogyny to go round without you having to imagine more with lazy bad faith analyses of people’s motives.
So, what, you think they actually listened to criticism and stopped naming their bots after women because they respect the opinions of their critics?
Interesting.
Like I said right at the top of the thread: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
A. techbros have unconscious misogyny
Or
B. techbros listen to feminist criticism
And... you're choosing B. Interesting.
When Siri was made, they wanted to give the image of an AI assistant even though it was barely able to schedule a timer. Make it feel futuristic.
I think now that there's true generation capabilities they want to emphasize the fact that this thing is not human & does not have a gender