Conclusion
Conclusion to Part 1
Overall, then, in a wide range of videos made independently over a range of years, YouTubers of minority identities have persistently reimagined Siri to be more like them. Some of their specific reimaginations are pretty stereotypical or downright cringe-worthy. But as parodies rather than “serious” proposals, they defer the challenge of “getting it right,” and they allow us, if we listen generously, to focus on the big idea: that we could create Siri who could adopt specific ways of being rather than trying to apply as generally as possible. If we designed Siri like that, we could make identity-specific recommendations for what to buy and not to buy; it could show identity-specific values, knowledge, and ways of interacting; it could address an identity's history; and it could be intersectionally created, not just one-dimensional. In all of these ideas, identities are active projects. So when we ask what identities we make available to people to interact with, we also ask what we ourselves might be like. Taking on this challenge is not straightforward; there are a lot of decisions that would still need to be made. But this is an emerging important issue for people to consider, especially those of us who study communication and its effects.
Commentary and points of connection for "Conclusion to Part 1"
Influential in my thinking on this is Jonathan Rossing's (2014) analysis of comedic sketches ("Prudence and Racial Humor") and his (2016) theory of humor as a rhetorical skill for civic life ("A Sense of Humor"). Listening generously is particularly important for people who occupy dominant subject categories because irony and other humorous forms are used to navigate power differences (Morgan, 2002).
This project has largely deferred practical challenges of implementing some of these ideas. And this project completely ignores technical difficulties that these recommendations include. These are intentional choices; this project's goal is to cultivate a more critically robust technological imagination, regardless of whether that's easy or even possible with today's technology. However, a few notes are in order.
One way to tone down politically the parodies examined here would be to simply give Siri different "personalities," since social identities like race and religion are charged and delicate. Amazon has already begun providing Alexa with celebrity personalities that users can activate (Krasnoff 2019). Similarly, Siri might be changed to allow people to mix and match what they want Siri to adopt, e.g. maintain the value of being respectful of family, but use a Yelp-based (identity-erasing) ordering of restaurants.
Revising Siri would also require more thought than the parodies provide in order to deal with how multifaceted people are - as Part 1 explored, only a few parodies take up intersectional identities. People of any single identity aren't monolithic, and everyone has multiple identities that can be more and less relevant in a given time and depending on a person's own journey. One way to deal with this would be to have Siri ask for how the user identifies. These self-identifications would need to be especially private; to take up the premise of one of the videos, imagine coming out to Siri! Different corporations may be better positioned to implement this than others; Amazon's Alexa, for instance, saves everything you say, whereas Apple has developed "differential privacy" as a way to use machine learning techniques while helping individuals remain anonymous. A self-identification set-up process might also address which Siri (assuming there would be many) to use as a "default." Relatedly, an identity-based Siri risks reifying a person's nascent identity (e.g. as Republican); ongoing updates or check-ins might address this challenge.
Finally, user studies of revised Siris would need to be conducted. As parodies, the YouTube corpus fictionalize what it would be like to actually interact with an identity-based Siri. Even as parodies, some YouTubers express ambivalence about the identity-based version or treat its silliness as the ground for the video. So studies may ultimately find that people don't like identity-based AI, or benefit from the interactions only at a long time scale. Still, as AI take on more and more social functions, identity is unavoidable and should be viewed as an ongoing rhetorical concern. The findings from part 2 indicate that in that empirical process we should also not leave today's real Siri untouched, but rather investigate ways to make it less powerful, possessive, and misguided.
Conclusion to Part 2
Part 2 of this project has explored today's Siri in two different ways. YouTubers who made parodies about the accents and national origins that Siri can hear especially play up how it feels to not be included, and indicate that in some cases, people are already treating voice-driven AI as a social agent. Then, considering how the parodies as a whole are distributed, this result is extended to suggest that today's Siri attempts to behave in an identity-neutral way. But three critiques of identity-erasure as an ideology for approaching AI link Siri's neutral, universalizing behavior to dominant identities. In other words, together, these YouTubers are arguing that as a social agent, today's Siri operates as straight, white, nonreligious, and unaccented. For developers to try not to make a decision regarding a voice assistant's identity still makes a decision.
In part, this situation is a problem of representation: if today's Siri (even the variants that we're comfortable with, like male/female, various languages, and various national dialects of English) are our only options, then we're not making diverse AI: we're not giving people the chance to see themselves in the AI they interact with. This situation is also is a problem of equity: if acting white, straight, nonreligious, and unaccented means (at least in part) oppressing others, then for Siri to adopt those identities means she also reinscribes dominant modes of moving through the world, and she encourages and circulates dominant ways of being. The takeaway, especially for those of us who study how we interact with emerging communication technologies like Siri and Alexa, is that we should feel more freedom to suggest voice-driven AI that's identity-based. As Part 1 shows, YouTubers of minority identities are, in a humorous way, suggesting that there are benefits. With people of minority identities in the lead, we should continue addressing these questions.
To me, the most cringe-worthy portrayals of an identity-based Siri in the whole corpus come from the parody "Ghetto Siri." (Although “ghetto” can be a location, it can also be used as a circumlocution for poor blackness. "Ghetto Siri" makes it clear that it is adopting a black racial identity, rather than just a locational identity, when a white user asks Siri how to be more black, and she rejects the request:)
In "Ghetto Siri," Siri is recruited as a surveillance tool to support lustful desires. In the first scene, Siri warns a girl not to have sex with a guy because he has a small penis. In a later scene, Siri shows two guys a girl's butt:
These provide a racialized vision for big tech's surveillance capabilities. Instead of what Siri can "find" being restaurants for us to spend money on, what this Siri can find is salacious photos and intimate sexual knowledge. Perhaps my squeamishness here should be resisted; why is it so much worse to imagine a surveillance apparatus devoted to sex than to profit? But it's not even just these two scenes; in one scene, ghetto Siri can't understand someone with an Asian accent, implying that this kind of exclusion is particularly ghetto. I admit that I tried to exclude this video from the corpus, rationalizing this to myself by noting that it didn't technically come up as a search result for “black siri” and it was “so silly.” More than any other, I worry that this video conveys an essentialist understanding of race: that, e.g. objectivizing potential sexual partners, is what makes someone black. The reminder here is that any identity-based version of Siri would need to be developed as something that is contextual: bound to a place, time, situation, audience - and therefore able to adapt and morph. For additional discussion of how people construct identities discursively (and how those then are taken up by others), see Bucholz & Hall (2005).