The why question is easily answered if you see how many negative reactions their choice of voice caused. A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.
I'm happy if advertising stops hitting the sexy/cliched stereotypes.
Sometimes the Guardian goes a bit far but OpenAI could have avoided this kind of article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/1...
(Edit: I guess I was being slightly inflammatory with my first sentence. I think the default voice should be gender-neutral and then let the user choose what makes them happy. I don't think it was clever of OpenAI to use a sexy female as the default voice in their demos as evidenced by us having this discussion)
ChatGPT, a system designed to deal with human language and answer in a way similar to a human, will surely be anthropomorphized, and many people will want it to have male or female voices.
Gender neutral should definitely exist as an option, it makes a lot of sense, but I don't see why it should be the only option.
They would have annoyed less people if the accents weren't so American and quirky. Google Maps has had a female voice since like forever and I don't remember any outrage.