In his sketch comedy bit "Black Siri," YouTuber Lamar Wilson asks questions of a black Siri and acts out her answers. Wilson uses identity terms specifically and jokingly frames the effort as appealing to his own identity: "I went in there and customized it a little bit, to make it more personal for me. So, I present to you, black Siri." (Black Siri)
Existing scholarship on identity and AI contextualizes the value of studying funny YouTube videos about Siri. Specifically, this project's focus on identity contributes to important ongoing questions about how people take agency in being represented technologically.
Some rhet/comp scholars are hesitant to focus on "identity" as such, preferring the more flexible concept of "difference." Difference, Stephanie Kerschbaum (2012) argued, helpfully avoids stabilizing or "fixing" identities like white, working class, or female (p. 619, with "fixing" carrying a pejorative pun on "trying to solve"). "Difference" also allows critical and pedagogical attention to what students actually mark as relevant, which often exceed big identity categories. (In her example, one student marked where she learned a grammatical rule - namely, at that university - as a relevant difference from her peer, and as a source of authority during peer review. This location-based appeal, Kerschbaum argued, would be hard to access in an identity-based analytic framework.) Thus, identity is "to be understood both through the contexts in which we communicate and act and by our embodiments of it" (p. 617, emphasis in original).
Similarly, Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (2014) suspected that identity categories, which ostensibly mark difference, actually presume a fundamental similarity among people. In making identity categories linguistically parallel (white, black, Asian, etc.), we may inadvertently create an epistemological parallel and think that we can really know others through comparison to our own experiences. Focusing on identity categories, then, can "flatten" difference.
Applying these arguments to Siri, these scholars would likely support revising Siri's scripts to be more contingent (context-specific to different use-cases), and more up for ongoing revision. Moreover, they would likely appreciate seeing how Siri is or could be "opaque" to various users (i.e. to see how Siri is not always comfortable to interact with, despite this being a core business goal of Siri). In other words, they would broadly authorize reimagining Siri in some way and critiquing Siri's interactions with people, as this project does in Parts 1 and 2. In this sense, scholarship on identity aligns with English and Communication research on AI and related technologies meant to complicate our sense of who/what can be a rhetor (Ingraham, 2014; Coleman, 2018; Brock & Shepherd, 2016; Fancher (2018); Gallagher (2017); Holmes (2018); Arola (2012); Eyman (2015); Brown (2014); Elish & boyd (2018)). For instance, Miles Coleman's (2018) concept of "machinic rhetorics" involved speculating that Siri is a productive entry point for identifying AI ethos: "Are Speech/Voice User Interfaces possible sites for productive disruption and resistance? Are they yet another instance in which ideology lurks in our 'neutral' interfaces? Machinic rhetoric helps us realize that yes, they are" (p. 347). Likewise, an older generation of scholarship argued that computers are cultural artifacts (Selber, 2004; Hill, 2010), critiqued the racial ideologies built into the early 1990s Mac interface (Selfe & Selfe, 1994), and explored the challenges and contradictions of changing society via technology (Feenberg, 2002 [1991]).
By pursuing identity as such, this project takes a similar approach to Nielsen (2015), who examined how online roleplaying games let players play with gender, race, sexual orientation, and even species (!) identities through designing their own avatar. (See also Beck's (2015) discussion of how websites impose "invisible" identities on people.) In Nielsen's analysis, these gameplay options extended and accentuated players' offline identities. As we turn to comedic videos about Siri, then, we might hypothesize that especially through play, people can leverage identities in ways unexpected by critics of identity, as both a resource for self- and group-identification, as well as a site of negotiating their representation in technical spheres.
- Identity as a resource. We would expect to find that YouTubers provide highly detailed descriptions about what that identity involves. In Part 1, this project groups those characterizations into wider categories, e.g. "values," "consumption," "ways of acting," etc., in order to avoid reproducing negative self-stereotypes. This structure also indicates that identity work is ongoing, contested, and up for revision, responding to Kerschbaum's (2012) concern.
- Identity as a site of negotiating representation. We would also expect YouTubers to use comedic videos to engage their audiences about Siri in a decidedly non-technical way. Because comedy doesn't need to be "taken seriously" (see Rossing, 2016; Ceccarelli, 1998), people on YouTube who wouldn't be taken seriously otherwise can make arguments that have bite to them, prompting us to listen well. Listening involves understanding, à la Alexander & Rhodes (2014), that we are somewhat opaque to each other. In Part 2, that means recognizing people's performance of being rejected by Siri (being literally "unheard"), as well as receiving three critiques of today's Siri. These prompt us to imagine revisions to Siri.
The identity-based approach taken in this project, then, is not just responsive to the YouTubers themselves; it has the possibility to affirm people's agency in reenvisioning our technological futures. This allows students and critics to better imagine "what might be otherwise" regarding Siri and other voice-driven AI.
