A Human Work
Mar. 27th, 2026 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
setsuledYesterday, Melania Trump appeared at the White House with a robot who speaks with pronounced vocal fry. I guess if your robot's going to resemble a berserk killing machine from Evangelion, having it sound like a 20 something barista is one way to counterbalance the horror.
Should I say it or she? I don't know, there will need to be a courtroom drama about robot pronouns.
Commander Data provides a Merriam-Webster definition of "android"--"an automaton made to resemble a human being." Melania's robot refers to itself as a "humanoid" which, on Star Trek and elsewhere, typically means an alien life form that bears some rudimentary resemblance to a human. I suppose they didn't use "android" for fear of legal troubles with Google's Android phone. Ironically, Google's Android was originally to be called "Droid" until there was the possibility of legal trouble with Lucasfilm because that's the word for robots in the Star Wars movies. So we have a little game of copyright musical chairs to reshape the landscape of our language.
Melania's robot notably doesn't take any questions and it seems like the barista speech was pre-recorded, possibly by a real barista. Though AI and synthetic voice generative software would seem to be far enough along to have such a level of communicative ability in a robot. Maybe there's not enough room for it amidst everything it needs to sense its environment and control its own movements in response. Human bipedal motion is a more delicate and complicated procedure than we're typically conscious of.
It was an altogether unimpressive demonstration, now that I think about it. Why am I even writing about it? Well, artificially intelligent robots seem like an inevitability at this point. Maybe this is a sign we can at least rest easy that they won't be working for Trump.
