#(and like I imagine if Google suddenly renamed ITS assistant AI Silas or Arlo there’d be an adjustment period…

[regallibellbright]

[ID: Tweet from Weird Al Yankovic, in reply to a screenshot of an AP article by Marla Sherman from June 16, 2023. The title reads, “Grammys exclude AI from winning awards: Only ‘human creators’ eligible”. Al’s response tweet reads, “Ugh. I keep telling them… I AM human!!!” End ID]

Yeah I definitely feel for the Als of the world due to the widespread use of sans serif fonts. On the other subject…

One: Alexa as a name TANKED in popularity when the Echo came out. (For that matter, Siri’s a name used in multiple languages as well.) And given how it had trended popularity-wise before that, it means a LOT of kids and teens had the name right as the speaker came out.

Two: Yeah we get harassed for it. That link’s to a BBC article, but it’s not the first one I read on the subject and it’s not the only one I found, it was just the first one I was confident wouldn’t be paywalled. Not the first story about someone with the name changing theirs to AVOID that harassment, either. It’s worst for kids and teens/college students - I lucked out in graduating JUST before - but yeah, we’ve basically all gotten at least a couple “Alexa, do X” ‘jokes’ from others that were not funny the first time, much less the twelfth. (I have gotten it from cousins. Adult cousins. Despite expressing annoyance.) Sometimes they qualify as sexual harassment, too! (If you’re wondering how… consider what an asshole could ask in that format. Fun times.)

Three: Amazon’s solution is that you can change the wake word for the Echo. This isn’t actually the case for all the things it’s a plug-in for now - reportedly, for instance, you can’t make the change for car Echoes. But it’s also a complete misdirection from the ACTUAL problem, as I doubt most of us have Echoes on principle. (I sure as hell don’t.) The problem’s that to society at large, because it’s the default wake word, the name “Alexa” has become synonymous with a smart device and not a person, so people with the name are a joke. The problem’s that everyone ELSE might not have changed their wake words, so you get podcasters warning in advance when they have a guest named Alexa on or referring to them by surname instead to avoid activating listeners’ Echoes. It’s systemic. And far from the biggest concern about the Echo given the privacy concerns of having a device around recording everything you say, but the fact that Amazon and Apple didn’t consider the potential social impact of using human names for their assistant AI wake words before doing it? The fact that they’ve CONTINUED to use those human names for what I guess are branding purposes even after it became clear this has caused issues for the humans who had them first? Yeah, pisses me off something fierce.

(Microsoft gets a pass here in that, while I’m sure there are at least a few “Cortana”s out there, they are almost certainly all named after the Halo character Microsoft named their assistant after. Maybe one or two are named after the legendary sword Curtana but like. Point being, before the assistant it was best known as the name of a fictional character.)

I feel sorry for people named Al (A L) because I see the name and briefly feel annoyance until I'm like, oh, that doesn't say AI