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)
If you're interested in her voice
It's the fifth place I've seen it since yesterday. And I haven't been looking. Even my mum sent me a Guardian article about it on Whatsapp.
Daily show: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/51ucQ4s7Crc
In my opinion, they should have hired a trans person, created a gender-neutral voice, and used that as the default. It would not have caused a backlash to the voices.
(Note that if you select that voice today, you might not actually be using it anymore. I noticed earlier today I was shunted off to Juniper, which I didn't like as much.)