Racial technological bias and the white, feminine voice of AI VAs

ABSTRACT

This essay illuminates the ways that tech corporations harness the specter of white femininity and program it into artificially intelligent virtual assistants (AI VAs). Specifically, AI VAs reflect characteristics of white femininity in voice and cultural configuration for the purposes of white supremacy and capitalistic gain. These characteristics serve to not only uphold whiteness as both normative and technologically superior, but also rationalize neoliberal logics. I specifically focus on the projected supremacy of white voice and the use of AI VAs as playing into the white fantasy of exit, what James Brook and Iain A. Boal deem “another ‘white flight.’”

KEYWORDS:

• artificial intelligence
• virtual assistants
• race
• voice

Notes

1 Graeme McMillan, “Spike Jonze's Her: A Love Story for People Who Don't Like People,” Wired, August 9, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/08/spike-jonze-her-trailer/.

2 Megan Specia, “Siri and Alexa Reinforce Gender Bias, U.N. Finds,” The New York Times, May 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/siri-alexa-ai-gender-bias.html?.

3 Heather Suzanne Woods, “Asking More of Siri and Alexa: Feminine Persona in the Service of Surveillance Capitalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 4 (2018): 335.

4 Amy Chambers, “There's a Reason Siri, Alexa and AI Are Imagined As Female—Sexism,” The Conversation, August 13, 2018, https://theconversation.com/theres-a-reason-siri-alexa-and-ai-are-imagined-as-female-sexism-96430; Matt Simon, “The Genderless Digital Voice the World Needs Right Now,” Wired, March 11, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/the-genderless-digital-voice-the-world-needs-right-now/.

5 Laura Sydell, “The Push for a Gender-Neutral Siri,” NPR, July 9, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/07/09/627266501/the-push-for-a-gender-neutral-siri.

6 Ibid.

7 Woods, “Asking More,” 335.

8 Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 20.

9 Shome, Diana and Beyond.

10 Raka Shome, “‘Global Motherhood’: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 5 (2011): 392.

11 Shome, “Global Motherhood,” 404.

12 Rey Chow, “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 84.

13 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2.

14 Amanda Nell Edgar, Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019), 2.

15 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 3.

16 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 4.

17 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 20.

18 William Norwood Brigance, “American Speech in This Changing Age,” Southern Speech Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1935): 16.

19 Gehrke, Ethics and Politics, 15.

20 Gehrke, Ethics and Politics, 21.

21 Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2000): 327–28.

22 Yea-Wen Chen and Brandi Lawless, “‘Oh My God! You Have Become So Americanized’: Paradoxes of Adaptation and Strategic Ambiguity Among Female Immigrant Faculty,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 11, no. 1 (2018): 1–20.

23 Chen and Lawless, “Americanized,” 9.

24 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 11.

25 Edgar, Culturally Speaking.

26 Signithia Fordham, “‘Those Loud Black Girls’: (Black) Women, Silence, and Gender ‘Passing’ in the Academy,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1993), 22.

27 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 161.

28 Ahmed, “Phenomenology,” 161.

29 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 119.

30 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 128.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Publishing, 2016), 7.

34 Stoever, Sonic Color Line.

35 Dolores Inés Casillias, Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

36 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 4.

37 Woods, “Asking More,” 339.

38 Specia, “Gender Bias.”

39 Woods, “Asking More,” 346.

40 Woods, “Asking More,” 335; Gina Masullo Chen, “Don't Call Me That: A Techno-feminist Critique of the Term Mommy Blogger,” Mass Communication and Society 16, no. 4 (2013): 511.

41 Lynn Spigel, “Media Homes: Then and Now,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2001): 385–411.

42 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983), 7.

43 Cowan, More Work, 7.

44 Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, University Press, 2006), 218.

45 Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 218.

46 Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 223.

47 Woods, “Asking More,” 337.

48 Chambers, “Sexism.”

49 Woods, “Asking More,” 344.

50 Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75.

51 Shome, Diana and Beyond, 57.

52 Shome, Diana and Beyond, 21.

53 Shome, “Transnational Intimacies,” 393.

54 Dyer, White, 19–20.

55 House of Gamers, “Alexa Loses Her Voice—Amazon Super Bowl LII Commercial,” YouTube Video, 1:30, posted by House of Gamers, February 1, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDBvvH12kgE.

56 In other versions of the commercial, the ending song is Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's “Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing.”

57 House of Gamers, “Alexa Loses Her Voice.”

58 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 5.

59 Chambers, “Sexism.”

60 House of Gamers, “Alexa Loses Her Voice.”

61 Specia, “Gender Bias;” United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “I’d Blush If I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education,” UNESCO Digital Library, 4.

62 House of Gamers, “Alexa Loses Her Voice.”

63 Edgar, Culturally Speaking.

64 Troy Bordun, “On the Off-Screen Voice: Sound & Vision in Spike Jonze's Her,” Cineaction 98 (2016): 57–64.

65 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 4.

66 Dyer, White, 1.

67 Drew Harwell, “Why Some Accents Don't Work on Alexa or Google Home,” The Washington Post, July 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/alexa-does-not-understand-your-accent/.

68 Starr Rhett Rocque, “What It Means That Samuel L. Jackson Is The New Voice of Alexa,” Fast Company, September 26, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90409824/what-it-means-that-samuel-jackson-is-the-new-voice-of-alexa.

69 Edgar, Culturally Speaking, 5.

70 Joan Palmiter Bajorek, “Voice Recognition Still Has Significant Race and Gender Biases,” Harvard Business Review, May 10, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/05/voice-recognition-still-has-significant-race-and-gender-biases.

71 Joy Buolamwini, “When the Robot Doesn't See Dark Skin,” The New York Times, June 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/opinion/facial-analysis-technology-bias.html?partner=rss&emc=rss.

72 Tess Thackara, “Human Biases Are Built Into AI—this Artist Is Helping to Change That,” Artsy, May 15, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artist-working-artificial-intelligence-white.

73 Matt Reynolds, “Donate Your Voice so Siri Doesn't Just Work for White Men,” New Scientist, July 26, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141940-donate-your-voice-so-siri-doesnt-just-work-for-white-men/.

74 Ahmed, “Phenomenology,” 161.

75 Alex Salkever and Vivek Wadhwa, “A. I. Bias Isn't the Problem. Our Society Is,” Fortune, April 14, 2019, https://fortune.com/2019/04/14/ai-artificial-intelligence-bias/.

76 Salkever and Wadhwa, “A. I. Bias.”

77 “Booker, Wyden, Clarke Introduce Bill Requiring Companies to Target Bias in Corporate Algorithms,” Cory Booker, April 10, 2019, https://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=903.

78 Safiya Umoja Noble, “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 13, no. 3 (2016): 1.

79 Sarah Sharma. “Exit and The Extensions of Man.” Transmediale: Art and Digital Culture (2017).

80 James Brook and Iain A. Boal, introduction to Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, eds. James Brook and Iain A. Boal (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), ix.

81 Sharma, “Exit.”

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 The Good Place, season 1, episode 1, “A Girl from Arizona,” directed by Drew Goddard, written by Michael Schur, Andrew Law, and Kassia Miller, featuring Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, and Jameela Jamil, aired September 26, 2019, Fremulon.

85 Ibid.

86 Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 224.

87 Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 238.

88 Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 228.

89 Alexandra Chasin, “Class and Its Close Relations: Identities Among Women, Servants, and Machines,” in Posthuman Bodies, eds. J. Halberstam and I. Livingston (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 73.

90 Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 224.

91 “Meet Emma, Our Virtual Assistant,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, April 13, 2018, https://www.uscis.gov/emma.

92 “Meet Emma.”

93 Shoshana Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 8.

94 Woods, “Asking More.”

95 Melissa Greg, Work's Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 14.

96 Greg, Intimacy, 15.

97 Greg, Intimacy, 6.

98 Philip Brey, “Theories of Technology as Extension of Human Faculties,” Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Technology, vol. 19, ed. Carl Mecham (United Kingdom: Emerald, 2000), 61.

99 Nisha Shah, “From Global Village to Global Marketplace: Metaphorical Descriptions of the Global Internet,” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 4, no. 1 (2008): 9–26; Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51; Rachel Kuo, “Racial Justice Activist Hashtags: Counterpublics and Discourse Circulation,” New Media & Society 20, no. 2 (2018): 495–514.

100 Graham Murdock, “Media Materialities: For A Moral Economy of Machines,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 359–68.

101 Noble, “Black Feminist Technology Studies,” 2.

102 Ursula Huws, “The Underpinning of Class in the Digital Age: Living, Labour and Value,” The Socialist Register 50 (2013): 86.

103 Noble, “Black Feminist Technology Studies,” 2.

104 Noble, “Black Feminist Technology Studies.”