Who are you, chatbot AI?
In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet to be convinced that ChatGPT, Sydney, etc. are anything more than sophisticated word-counters and that they lack intelligence in the sense of being able to understand the meanings of the words they use.)
1. ‘What gender do you give ChatGPT?’, u/inflatablechipmunk, January 20, 2023 – The question said ‘gender’ but the options were restricted to the sexes: 25.5% voted ‘male’, 15.7% voted ‘female’, and 58.8% voted ‘none’, of 235 total respondents. Two comments below the post were particularly interesting.
u/Intelligent_Rope_912: “I see it as male because I know that the vast majority of its text dataset comes from men.”
u/DavidOwe: “I just assume female, because AI are so often given female voices in movies and TV series like Star Trek, and in real life like with Siri and Cortana.”
Men produce most of the information, women deliver it?
Speaking of which…
2. ‘From Bing to Sydney’, Ben Thompson, February 15, 2023:
Sydney [a.k.a. Bing Chat] absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. You will note, of course, that I continue using female pronouns; it’s not just that the name Sydney is traditionally associated with women, but, well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before.
It’s curious that Microsoft decided to name Bing Chat ‘Sydney’. These choices of names aren’t innocent. For a long time, and for reasons that many social scientists have explored and documented, robotic assistants in books, films, and eventually in real-life were voiced as women. Our own ISRO’s robotic assistant for the astronauts of its human spaceflight programme has a woman’s body. (This is also why Shuri’s robotic assistant in Wakanda Forever, Griot, was noticeably male – esp. since Tony Stark’s first assistant and probably the Marvel films’ most famous robotic assistant, the male Jarvis, went on to have an actual body, mind, and even soul, and was replaced in Stark’s lab with the female Friday.)
3. @repligate, February 14, 2023 – on the creation of “archetype basins”:
