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Comment by anonagoog | Hacker News Reader

This anodyne name is likely because there was a small internal shitstorm over calling it Meena because some folks were tired of chat bots being given women’s names

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As a woman I appreciate it. I get so tired of things we order around being named after women.

IMHO, we probably should try to get to the point that bots/assistants are less "a thing we order around" and "a thing we communicate with", if partially because of the pretty bad vibes of "creating slaves" or being comfortable ordering such programs around, regardless of the degree we are confident we haven't accomplished computer sentience. It's just a bad pattern to be in. I recall a lot of work going into making Cortana refuse to tolerate abusive language towards it.

Maybe Google has it right with not anthropomorphizing Google Assistant and giving it a human name, but in that case LaMDA is a move in the wrong direction it seems: The conversations demonstrated emulated emotion in a way that generally speaking, most bots do not.

Is there any work on making difficult-to-gender voices for bots that still sound human? Maybe if we were to combine names that aren't traditionally given to humans with a voice that is hard to gender? Should we intentionally make bots/assistants sound more robotic, so they do not try to "sound human"?

I think it's kinda an interesting question to figure out what the best practice should be moving forwards.

This post makes me feel weird. Because I don't want to be forced to put on niceties for an inanimate object. I want to order my device around. Not as a power trip, but simply because it's a device, whose function is to complete commands.

I'm sympathetic to your points on why that's a bad vibe and might not be great when the line is blurred, but... I don't know. It seem strange to afford rights, if only conversational/social rights, to an object.

I think it’s more out of respect for other people than for the bot itself. If your bot is given a feminine name and voice, and accepts being called various sexist slurs, then it becomes a rather offensive depiction of women.

That's a related but somewhat different point.

1. I don't want to feel bad for giving commands to my machine. For avoiding niceties. This is not talking about slurs, etc, but not saying 'please' or some such.

2. I agree it would be nice to avoid negativd depictions of groups. Feminine bots accepting abuse isn't great.

I guess the balance for me is kind of like what they person I was replying to said: don't make it a person. I know I'm not cruel, but it is strange to think you'd want to develop it to refuse commands if you're mean or something. I don't want that.

I have an example of what you may be trying to illustrate: the two types of AI in Star Trek. 1 being the ship. Crew members happily bark at it with no manners. But then there are things like Data and holodeck programs where crew members will interact with them like real humans.

Maybe there is some middle ground for both types of robots?

I agree that you shouldn’t have to say “please” to set your egg timer or get the weather forecast. It would perhaps be amusing with a bot that refused to do anything unless you were extremely polite, but it wouldn’t be very practical.

What’s interesting to me is how this is never a problem with a traditional menu or button based UI. Maybe I’m muttering “f*ck off” as I click “Remind me later” on the umpteenth alert of the day trying to get me to update this or that, but the software would never know. (On the other hand, you could argue that the software is offending me by trying to get me to do something that is mostly in the developer’s interest, and not allowing me to say “No” - this is where being able to be frank using voice input could be quite liberating)

I think my concern is that if you talk to a bot in a certain manner, it normalizes talking to humans in that manner, if the bot is "human enough".

I wonder if the solution is to stop building bots to emulate humans: Natural language processing is important so humans can make ordinary requests of a computer without having to remember specific syntax. But perhaps we should stop trying to make the computer respond the way a human would, so that people don't view it like a human or personality.

Very confusing to me as a man why we don't just tell the thing what it should be called and have it use that name wherever it appears on the device (e.g. "Hey David" instead of "Hey Siri.") I think Google Assistant is the only good assistant name, but saying "Hey, Google" feels weird when it's technically supposed to be some kind of pseudo-intelligence instead of the whole company.

I would assume it's related to limitations in the early wake word detection hardware and software which require pretraining of the weights, which were usually hard coded into the low power edge system.

Nothing would stop a modern system from training a new wakeword in a cloud system, if enough samples were available.

Stop confirming my worst biases about Google culture!

Edit: I think I was being snarky, my apologies

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