The interview with Susan Bennett and the other contemporary sources surrounding the gendered expectations and programming of AI have fit in nicely with my interpretation of Speak this week. The biggest thing that stuck out to me across these sources was the general co-optation of a female-sounding voice to carry out the tasks of widely white, male programmers. In the case of Susan Bennett, as she mentioned in her interview, her pay was exclusive to the number of hours she spent recording syllables for Siri, but her legal ownership and monetary payout stopped after that point. Apple solicited her services and the nurturing timbre of her voice long enough to make Siri a household name and generate years of profit on their behalf, yet she was not included in the royalties, and ultimately dropped altogether from recent iPhone models. It is certainly representative of how women’s labor in tech industries is often co-opted and the women themselves are given neither the prestige or the financial benefits of their contributions.Â
Speak, of course, depicts the gendered expectations that influence the programming of AI. The text so far has given us a candid look into the personal lives and memories of the male programmers themselves, who feel generally disillusioned or wronged by the women in their lives, yet create the various MARY models and babybots whose tasks are to emotionally support the humans around them. While we haven’t quite observed the full result of this disconnect in perspectives between the creators and their creations, one can piece together based on the severity of the legal cases and the quarantine situation that the gendered humanization of AI is going to have drastic consequences.