Alexa and Siri are normalising the idea that machines speak like subservient, human women – Dazed asked the experts why we should be worried

What does the advancement of AI mean for the future of the arts, music, and fashion? Will robots come for our creative industries? Could a machine ever dream like a human can? This week on Dazed, with our new campaign AGE OF AI, we’re aiming to find out. In 1966, a whole 28 years before the first use of the term “chatbot”, MIT Professor Dr Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA – “A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine”. Its purpose was encapsulated in its title: to “converse”, through textual exchange, with a human user. You can watch an example chat here, blogged by Adam Curtis, where ELIZA is ‘playing’ a psychotherapist, its most infamous role. A user types “you’re afraid of me” and ELIZA gives the (slightly comic book villain-ish) response: “does it please you to think you’re afraid of me?”. The ‘therapy’ is pretty bare bones – the script was intended, Weizenbaum would later admit, as a piss-take of a certain type of therapeutic method that often involves reformulating a patient’s grievance as a question. But ELIZA’s users, as you may already have guessed, began to talk to the program like a real therapist. They spilled their secrets to it. They addressed it in “intimate terms”. Weizenbaum’s secretary even asked him to leave the room so she could chat to it in private. Weizenbaum was horrified; he quickly published a book that tried to delineate which human activities AI was, and was not, ethically and empathetically suitable for – he was against, for example, AI soldiers and AI customer support. The whole episode caused him to be troubled by, in Weizenbaum’s words, “fundamental questions… about nothing less than man’s place in the universe… I shall probably never be rid of them”. (Or as Curtis puts it, “he got very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people.”) After this existential crisis, Weizenbaum’s comments about AI often sounded a bit like the scientist in horror stories who admits that what stalks the other characters is his or her experiment gone horribly wrong. In his last discussion of the subject before his death, he called the idea that we could invent an artificial human an “immense nonsense… related to delusions of grandeur.” ELIZA was one of the earliest precursors to the conversational AI we now carry in our pockets and perch on our shelves. Go ask Siri, “who’s ELIZA?” and it will respond: “ELIZA is my good friend. She was a brilliant psychiatrist, but she’s retired now”. They’ve even chatted. Of course, the obvious difference between the two is that, after more than 40 years of developments in spoken language processing, we can speak to our chatbots now – and their voices will continue to grow more and more like our own. In a blog post discussing their uncannily humanlike Duplex, an addition to the Google Assistant that can carry out “real world” tasks over the phone, Google celebrated a step towards “the long-standing goal of human-computer interaction: (for) people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other.” “They’re telling us they will tell people it's an artificial system. Well, you don’t need to do that if it had a clearly artificial voice – you’d immediately know” – Professor Roger Moore

This goal, for ‘natural conversation’ between us and human-sounding AI, is playing out as an arms race of sorts between the major tech companies. Weizenbaum named ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle, from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, a play about a phonetics professor who bets that he can pass a working-class flower girl off as a duchess by teaching her to speak “properly”. In the modern equivalent, if you can teach your Alexa to pass itself off as a human, Amazon will pay you $3.5 million. Wired reported last year on the fervour among some Apple developers to get Siri’s voice up to lifelike parity with its competitors. And the Google assistant gets regular upgrades to capture the “pitch and pauses” of human speech. “There is a sort of natural inevitability about it”, says Professor Roger Moore, who works in the field of Spoken Language Processing at University of Sheffield. He holds the rarer position of being against both the historic move to speech-based interaction, and also now the trend towards human-sounding devices. “I’ve been in the speech and technology business for about 150 years, and speech-based interaction has always been touted as the natural way that we will interact with machines... back in the 1980s, for instance, I remember a marketing byline: ‘you've been learning since birth the only skill necessary to operate our equipment’.” The root of Professor Moore’s concern is usability, though this quickly leads him into ethical terrain. He believes that a human voice indicates the possession of human language – i.e. the richest, most complex communication system in the known universe. “One argument is that we make huge assumptions about what the other person knows just by virtue of them being another human being, and that makes the language very efficient and effective,” he explains. “But the machines don't have that.” So, “whilst aspirationally it would be fantastic to use language to interact with a machine, the question then comes – so what about the poor old machine? Maybe it isn’t up to that.” It’s in this gap, between the expectations induced in a person by a human-sounding voice and the reality of that machine’s nature, that we find some serious ethical headscratchers. The Google Duplex inadvertently foregrounded a major one. The tech’s shiny new hook is that it mimics the disfluency of human speech – the umms and errs we make when, as the saying goes, the brain is going faster than the mouth. (If you watch the demo, which is simultaneously impressive and creepy, you can hear attendees cheering whenever Duplex stutters). Though it's important to note the Duplex can't engage in general conversation – it's limited to making restaurant reservations, scheduling hair appointments, and retrieving a business’s holiday hours – Professor Moore notes a paradox at the heart of Google’s marketing strategy: “They’re telling us they will tell people it's an artificial system. Well, you don’t need to do that if it had a clearly artificial voice – you’d immediately know.”