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The voices of AI are telling us a lot
There’s a reason why many chatbots sound like women.
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Women’s voices have often fuelled imagined technologies before they were built into real ones.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PIXABAY
Amanda Hess
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What does artificial intelligence (AI) sound like? Hollywood has been imagining it for decades. Now, AI developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk.
In May, OpenAI revealed upgrades to its artificially intelligent chatbot. ChatGPT, the company said, was learning how to hear, see and converse in a naturalistic voice – one that sounded much like the disembodied operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her.
