Questões de Vestibular de Inglês

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

     A study carried out by Lauren Sherman of the University of California and her colleagues investigated how use of the “like” button in social media affects the brains of teenagers lying in body scanners.

    Thirty-two teens who had Instagram accounts were asked to lie down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. This let Dr. Sherman monitor their brain activity while they were perusing both their own Instagram photos and photos that they were told had been added by other teenagers in the experiment. In reality, Dr. Sherman had collected all the other photos, which included neutral images of food and friends as well as many depicting risky behaviours like drinking, smoking and drug use, from other peoples’ Instagram accounts. The researchers told participants they were viewing photographs that 50 other teenagers had already seen and endorsed with a “like” in the laboratory.

     The participants were more likely themselves to “like” photos already depicted as having been “liked” a lot than they were photos depicted with fewer previous “likes”. When she looked at the fMRI results, Dr. Sherman found that activity in the nucleus accumbens, a hub of reward circuitry in the brain, increased with the number of “likes” that a photo had.

The Economist, June 13, 2016. Adaptado.