Siri's Identity

The three-part series "If Siri was Mexican" has several age-based examples of attention to family. In all of these, Siri enforces family protocols. She doesn't participate in activities that don't have parental permission:

-"Siri, text Eric that I'll be there for the party."
[Mexican Siri] "Did you ask your mom for permission?"
"No, I'm 23, I don't need to."
"You still live at home pendejo, so ask for permission." [Part 3]

When she does, she uses guilt to try to dissuade actions that could make the mother feel abandoned:

-"Text my mom that I'm gonna be out late today."
[Mexican Siri] "Okay, texting La Llorona that you're going to be out late."
"What? No no no no no." [Part 2. This refers to a fable about a mother weeping for her children]

Or even threatens to tattle on someone:

-"Siri, open YouTube."
[Mexican Siri] "Okay, I'll let Cucuy know you want to watch YouTube instead of clean your room." [Part 3]

"Give me directions to Michael's house."
[Mexican Siri] "Did you do your chores?"
"Uh, no."
"Calling mom." [Part 2]

She also knows that parental anger is a lingering threat:

-"Siri, can you tell me a scary story?"
[Mexican Siri] "Once upon a time, a little boy forgot to turn off the stove for the beans and his mom came home." [Part 2]

And Siri will even participate in forms of family discipline:

-[Son to mother] "I'm not gonna take out the trash."
[Mother] "Siri, my son won't listen to me."
[Mexican Siri] "[Picture of flip-flop] Try this Señorita." [Part 1]

It's interesting that only in this If Siri was Mexican series are age-based forms of family respect so highlighted. These examples could be considered more complex than this paper's system of values, knowledge, and ways of interacting: Siri adopts a type of alignment through her awareness of family conflict and consistent advocacy for the mother in the family.

Putting it crudely and iterating on a biological understanding of these identities, Siri doesn’t have a body, and she doesn't have skin color, sexual desire, “beliefs,” or a place where she was born. (Although some of the parodies do still imagine this: Siri has lesbian sex in Coming Out to Siri, she gets her hair cut in IF SIRI WAS GAY, and she listens to music herself in Siriqua.) Thus, for her to "be" any of these identities, the parodies must to some extent enact a social constructionist view of those identities. Some parodies, like Black Siri, use a wide range of semiotic resources to help Siri enact a new identity: visualizing her, revoicing her, and rewriting her responses. Others, like Mexican GPS and Jewish Siri, don't visualize Siri but do revoice and rewrite her answers. Others, like Hawaiian Pidgin Siri and Apple Scotland, don't visualize her and rely on the default voice, only rewriting her responses. And others, like Hyderabadi Moms and Nonna Paola, interact with the real Siri, but dramatize their own reactions. The parodies that only rewrite Siri's responses are particularly impressive at their ability to convey identity, since they don’t even have full discursive control. They have to yield identity that could be marked through pronunciation, intonation, and prosody.

At the same time, Siri is embodied in the sense of residing on servers in Apple's global data servers (i.e. "in the cloud"), with some processing done on people’s phones. For more on the physical infrastructure of the Internet, see Mendelsohn & Choclas-Wood's short documentary (2011). It’s unwise environmentally to ignore these aspects.

One interdisciplinary account of consumption-based identity work is "consumer culture theory" (CCT). Arnould and Thompson (2005) reviewed CCT research, suggesting that consumers can be viewed as "identity seekers and makers" (871) when the marketplace is viewed as "a preeminent source of mythic and symbolic resources through which people, including those who lack resources to participate in the market as full-fledged consumers, construct narratives of identity" (871).

Speaking from a rhetorical perspective, Greg Dickinson (2002) argued that in a postmodern age, places of consumption are also places in which material arrangements allow people to participate in and draw from in developing a sense of self:

Our collective and individual subjectivities are always at stake, and they are always at stake even in, perhaps especially in, the mundane and banal practices of the everyday. Our selves are under construction as we hoist a cup of coffee, buy a magazine, teach a class, read a book, discuss the weather, ride our bikes to work. (p. 6)

This project would add, "and ask Siri for a recommendation."

It makes sense that the videos' reimagined Siris would draw on consumption as a source of identity formation, given how Apple, Amazon, and Google's voice "assistant" frame is within a business context of buying, learning, dictating, etc. But it's appropriate to feel some hesitation here. For some scholars, consumption-based identity work can even be analyzed as "suicide" (Warde, 1994, following Durkheim).

Surprisingly, three of the reambiguations are name-based and therefore within the real Siri's purview:

-"Avroham Fried, call Chaim Yichiel Miche."
[Jewish Siri] "Say 1 for Chaim Cohim Michel Goldberg, say 2 for Chaim Chohim Michel Goldfarb."
"The second one." (The Jewish Siri)

-[Gay Siri] "iGay, call Ryan."
"Which of the 10 Ryans in your contact list would you like me to call?"
"My ex, Ryan."
"Which of the 8 Ryans in your contact list would you like me to call?"
"I don't care!" (iGay (Siri parody))

-"Siri, can you call my tía?"
[Mexican Siri] "[long list displayed] Which tía do you want to call?" (If Siri was Mexican PART 3)

These draw on the stereotypes that certain Jewish people's names are common, that gay people are promiscuous, and that Mexican people have large families, respectively.

Sometimes the Siri performs a culturally specific disambiguation:

-[while looking at a Ford Mustang] "Siri, how much is a Mustang?"
[Mexican Siri] "[picture of a horse] According to my sources, they cost 50,000 pesos" (If Siri was Mexican PART 1)

-[while putting on a tie] "Siri, what's the name of the place where they prepare food right in front of you?"
[Mexican Siri] "[picture of a sidewalk food vendor] Do you mean, Elotero?" [If Siri was Mexican, part 2]

In the first exaple, the person's view of a car cues viewers to the speaker's intended meaning of (the car) Mustang (rather than the type of horse). The second example has more subtle visual clues; I suspect that the guy putting on a tie is supposed to signal a formal dinner (perhaps a date), suggesting that he might be thinking of hibachi grill. This would be a funny contrast to the Mexican Siri's recommendation of a casual street vendor. AI's ability to appropriately disambiguate is at the forefront of not only theoretical AI research (called "word-sense disambiguation"), but is also central to the Turing test (see Fancher 2018), and critical research on Google's search algorithms (Noble 2018, see especially her motivating example of search results for "black girl").

This division is ad hoc, meant just to indicate a variety of areas where identity-construction happens. Sociolinguists are more likely to identify specific moves involved in positioning oneself relative to those. For instance, Graham Ranger (2010), in a review of Coupland's book Style: Language Variation and Identity summarizes:

• targeting - ascribing identity;
• framing - making certain linguistic features more or less relevant: Coupland distinguishes between socio-cultural framing, genre framing and interpersonal framing;
• voicing - the issue here is of how speakers impose 'ownership of an utterance or a way of speaking’ (114);
• keying - relating to ‘the tone, manner or spirit of the act’ (114, quoting Downes (1998)); and
• loading - 'the level of a speaker's investment in an identity being negotiated’ (114)

My interest is in showing what parts of life these processes can affect, through people's interactions with Siri.

As an extension of this, see Part 2 of this project, when one of the other Black Siri parodies suggests that, in contrast, a "white" Siri might like kinky sex.

Other scholars have detailed similar forms of "communicative resistance" among black women especially (Davis, 2018, "Taking Back the Power"; Siri's reimagined race intersects with her gender here). More generally, discourse norms among African Americans include an extremely embedded (rather than decontextualized) view of what's appropriate to say:

"Thus from a black perspective, questions should appear in social contexts which incorporate or reflect their reasoning, rather than simply satisfy institutional or intellectual curiosity and need." (Morgan, p. 52)

Similarly, in Shirley Brice Heath's ethnography of how adults interact with children in the black neighborhood of Trackton, she noted that analogies, story-starters, and accusations are the most common. Questions in which the answerer has the information are rare; rarer still are questions in which the answer is known to both questioner and answerer (p. 104, 111). These are similar to the questions that the black Siris reject in the parodies as well.

In addition, this reimagined characteristic ends up rejecting the (stereotypically feminine) submissiveness that is built into Siri, in that Siri is a conversation agent that a) comes with a female voice by default (at least in the US); and

b) is framed as a voice "assistant" (a traditionally female-gendered and frequently sexualizd role).

By rejecting stupid or obvious questions, then, these black Siris are responsive to feminist critiques of how past (and current) female AI respond weakly to inappropriate requests (Brahnam & De Angeli, 2012; Woods, 2018; Brahnam & Weaver, 2015; Strait, Ramos, Contreras, & Garcia 2018; for popular recognition of this, see Stern 2017).

It would normally be considered cultural appropriation for a white woman to get cornrows. Interestingly, then, with Siriqua's reimagined racial power comes a reimagined historical meaning of cornrows. In this scene, cornrows represent the pain that a white woman must undergo in order to present herself according to Siriqua's standards.

Along the lines of “an eye for an eye.” For an accessible overview of reparations, see Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations".

The exception being "Stuff Hyderabadi Moms Say to Siri"

Today, "intersectionality" is often used to mean simply "involving multiple identities at once" (e.g. gender and race), or in a more nuanced way, to mean that privilege/oppression is "multiplicative." But in Kimberle Crenshaw's foundational (1989, 1991) articles, the insight had to do with the legal, activist, political, and cultural visibility of discrimination. For instance, when viewing employment only in terms of race, courts wouldn't find discrimination, because some black people were being promoted. And when viewed only in terms of gender, courts wouldn't find discrimination, because some women were being promoted. It was only by viewing both race and gender that black women as such could be seen to be discriminated against. "The paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of the most privileged Blacks" (p. 151). Thus, intersectionality is as much a theory that pushed against feminist and antiracist theory of the day (as well as simplistic identity politics presently) as it is one that assists in left-leaning coalitions. This insight that intersectionality speaks to visibility under multiple forms of oppression is carried through by Buolamwini & Gebru's (2018) study of bias in facial recognition AI. Analyzed just by skin tone or just by gender, the facial recognition AI algorithms under examination performed adequately. But when intersecting skin tone and gender, misidentification of dark-skinned women was found to be 34.7%! For another excellent essay on intersectionality in emerging technologies, see Costanza-Chock (2018).

The on-screen translation of the Turkish is a little obscure here with Siri adopting a “pose” and being "so tough." However, one of my connections online, Sarah Adams, a retired military linguist, confirmed that the word translated as "pose" means having an "attitude," and the word translated as "tough" means that Siri is "difficult/unyielding." The leader's harsh assessment of Siri's behavior here seems partly precipitated by the fact that she hasn't responded with a Muslim greeting (see Part 2 of this project), but Adams suggests that the gender dynamics in the male Muslim Turkish setting "adds another layer of expectation that she be agreeable."

This isn’t to say that there would need to be endless versions, so that all possible identities are represented. Not only is this impractical, but it ignores that many of these parodies show interactions with what might be thought of as adjacent identities. An adjacent identity (e.g. a Mexican Siri who is Catholic, when the user is Mexican but not Catholic) would provide the chance for a small level of cross-cultural (or inter-species?) communication. The dynamics of cross-cultural/inter-species(?) communication with AI-driven voice assistants have not been well explored yet. For one perspective, see the reparations-driven interpretation of Siriqua above.