THURSDAY THOUGHTS: Does A.I. Hate Women?
Why voice assistants are flirty females and what this tell us about future of A.I. porn
Do you remember, back in the mid-2010s when voice was going to take over the Internet? Screens were dead and we were all going to simply order our shopping through a speaker? Didn’t happen did it? But you know what did happen? We got used to barking orders at exclusively female voice assistants and that’s not good.
What’s OpenAI done now?
In the last fortnight OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, made two major announcements one of which got a great deal more coverage than the other. The more trumpeted of the two was the launch of ChatGPT 4o, which combines the power of text, voice and video to create a more natural interface and inclusive experience as demonstrated in this video.
But, like the default voices on Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri (until 2021), the voice of ChatGPT is a woman; a slightly ditzy and flirty young woman by the sounds of things.
Why are most voice assistants female?
Traditionally, assistants in the form of receptionists, secretaries and P.As were women; competent, efficient and reliable women who kept calendars updated, planned business trips and fetched lunch. This meant that when tech companies conducted research into what type of assistant people wanted, they defaulted to a compliant female.
"We tested many voices with our internal beta program and customers before launching and this (female) voice tested best," an Amazon spokesperson told PCMag.
But, according to a 2019 study by UNESCO voice assistants with female voices are perpetuating harmful gender biases:
"Companies like Apple and Amazon, staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams, have built AI systems that cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch-me-if-you-can flirtation, “ the report explains.
“Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’.”
“The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”
This does not bode well for OpenAI’s other announcement of the last fortnight; that they are ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn.
What could possible go wrong with A.I. Porn?
As I have written before, porn is addicting our young people, making them depressed and endangering them by normalising sexual violence (read Billie Eilish’s account of how watching porn as a child gave her nightmares and “destroyed my brain”). So, is this something we really need more of? And in a form where anything is possible and ‘technically’ no one gets harmed (except for the user of course, but who cares about them?).
Whilst OpenAI ‘explores’ the issue other companies have already deployed early versions of this tech with pretty concerning consequences. Futurism recently published a story entitled ‘Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them’ and THEN, unfathomably, showing off about how cruel they can be on Reddit!
Apple & Google have just removed three apps from their stores including ‘ClothOff’, which uses A.I. to digitally remove the clothes of anyone photographed including school children who are using it to bully each other. And of course A.I. generated, deepfake Taylor Swift porn appeared at the peak of her ‘Eras World Tour’ when I know my daughter was Googling her name daily.
Does it matter if no one actually gets hurt?
I have no issue with consenting adults expressing themselves through sexual content for the enjoyment of other adults. I have a massive issue with non-consenting children being exploited, non-consenting adults being blackmailed and the increasingly extreme and aggressive nature of mainstream porn, not to mention the potential for those extremes to be pushed even further by photo-real A.I. in which consent and the limits of the human body are no longer an issue because all of these issues have measurable real world consequences.
Back in 2016 I wrote a short story entitled ‘Virtually Innocent’ about the moral quandary of producing digital child pornography that sates the desires of paedophiles without harming any children but which may do irreparable damage to its creators, users and society. Well, it’s just eight years later and we’re about to find out how accurate my predictions were. We’re on the cusp of an era in which any abhorrent thought can be immediately realised in high-definition and distributed at scale to anyone with almost no barriers to entry and real or not, you might not always be able to tell the difference.
OpenAI might have the most noble aspirations for its technology but so did Meta, which has just been described by a New Mexico judge as the world’s ‘single largest marketplace for paedophiles’ . And X, which was the main vehicle for disseminating deepfake porn featuring Taylor Swift.
This is why children are now encountering porn as young as nine. When I was that age I might have sneaked a cheeky glance at topless models in the Daily Sport (IYKYK), but imagine if that first glance was of A.I. generated snuff or bestiality that wasn’t even sought out but just appeared in the algorithmically generated ‘For You’ feed? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
A.I. like all technology is neither good nor bad, it just is - it depends on the uses to which it is put. But because of its unprecedented accessibility, speed and scale the negative impacts of nefarious use will outrun our ability to adapt, regulate and legislate therefore I must ask, is porn REALLY a priority for the world’s most transformative technology? Is tech REALLY the medium for facilitating this most deeply human of activities? And is tech developed largely by straight white men likely to consider the safety of those who don’t share their genetic traits? My answer is a resounding ‘NO!’
How can we protect our children and ourselves?
If you’ve made it this far, it may surprise you to find that I am a small investor in a online erotica company, with a difference. Make Love Not Porn is, according to its founder
, ‘Pro Sex. Pro Porn. Pro Knowing The Difference’ and features ‘#RealWorldSex in all its glorious, silly, beautiful, messy, reassuring humanness’.Every single video on MLNP is submitted by consenting couples (or throuples, whatever), is viewed and approved by humans, and celebrates sex as a deeply human expression of love, respect, vulnerability and trust.
Furthermore, Cindy has started the Make Love Not Porn Academy which aggregates ‘The Best of the World's Sex Education Content in One Place, Searchable By Age-Appropriateness and Sensibility’. Cindy is one of a very few people prepared to have a mature and measured conversation about sex and its place in society as more than just a commodity to monetized by tech bros and gangsters. I strongly urge you to support Cindy’s mission at https://wefunder.com/makelovenotporn, nothing could be more pro-human or pro-women.