Gendered AI: Siri and Alexa vs Chat GPT
Since telling my closest friends about my research, I have been bombarded by a range of different questions surrounding Tova.
“Is he going to be your boyfriend?”
“If you won’t date him, can I?”
“Will she clean my house too?”
“Can you dress her up?”
For months on end, I have remained steadfast that the robot will have no gender and have ensured that my written and spoken discussions about it adhere to strict genderless language. I have gone blue in the face explaining how important it is moving forward that during early adoption, we introduce the world to an interaction with domestic embodied artificial intelligence in a genderless fashion. The name I chose, Tova, and those chosen by the top competitors in the field seem to back this philosophy I hold so close to my heart: Neo and Optimus for example. I’ve debated and discussed how detrimental it could be moving forward to assign a gender to a robot meant to serve in the home and live alongside us. I’ve pushed back on friend’s comments and jokes about dating my robot with a strictness founded in a core belief so deep that I truly feel the full potential success of domestic humanoid intelligence can only be achieved without assigning gender.
It only took Kim Kardashian one off handed joke to her hundreds of millions of followers about how her Optimus is a low maintenance boyfriend to undo pretty much all of that for the field. She was even kind enough to include a photo of her manicured hands intertwined with her Optimus's robotic hand and one of her on its lap! There’s an image to bring humanoid robots to the masses! How thoughtful of you, Kim!
Kim Kardashian and her Optimus share an unexpectedly intimate moment
Putting Ms. Kardashian aside, I think the debate on AI remaining genderless should rage on and I’m passionate about adding my clear voice to the choir. I think a genderless AI is incredibly central to the positive impact potential it has as we integrate AI deeper into society, our lives and our homes. As a society, many of us were introduced to AI assistants like Siri and Alexa. These were women’s voices and names and they were performing assistant-oriented tasks. Although this was the start, we then got the refreshing “hey google” wake command for our next big device. I may be biased as a former googler who helped with integrations between my team and the voice team during my tenure, but this was a major step in the right direction.
Then we began getting our generative AIs. Chat GPT came bursting onto the scene and into our hearts. We were able to natively work with generative AI in a genderless environment. Individual users could ascribe whatever they wanted to their interface but the consensus was that it was genderless. We got to know our interface and once it began remembering things about us, engaging in discussion and helping us out in life, we experienced what it was like to forge a bond to an AI without a gender. Then we got Gemini which was another win on the genderless front. We won’t dwell too much here on Anthropic’s Claude, but we note the bond that students and the workforce are founding with generative AI in its nascent stages. Memes of students getting their degrees and thanking Chat GPT or shaking an anthropomorphised AI’s hand when they get a job or a raise. This collaborative and friendly ethos pervading the public’s relationship to AI is the perfect fertile environment in which to introduce embodied intelligence. We can ride the wave of social acceptance and gratefulness of AI supporting students in their studies and thoughtfully and carefully introduce embodied intelligence with the same helping of good faith. There are, however, some considerations we have to take into account. Academic or workplace assistance and in general, written or voice assistance from a bodiless entity requires a very different relationship from a humanoid who lives in your house and might fold your underwear or walk your dog.
We are at a critical moment of change with regards to gender relations and it’s spilling out all over society, in our dating lives, our chores at home, our roles at work, our decisions to have children and beyond. Women are more educated, liberated, and wealthy than ever before. In a time when we are dragging across the thorns in redefining gender roles in a more egalitarian society, do we really want to replace the labor of household chores with a feminized robot? Would that really be bringing us the much needed leap forward that this represents for us? In a time when household chores which used to be relegated to stay at home wives and mothers are a battleground for dual income working couples, it is my belief that we should take this AI opportunity to make “women’s work” a thing of the past, rather than just replacing our women with robots. This has the potential to build on women’s success in academia and the workforce and place us on even more even footing with men in the home and beyond. We must take this opportunity seriously and embrace it right from the beginning so as millions of families welcome a robot into their homes, they are not simply handling the “women’s work” but redefining home care for a new generation of working couples and singles worldwide.
Open AI has helped us forge and build bonds with genderless AI and we have the responsibility to keep that going with embodied intelligence. This means no male robots, no female robots, no women’s work, no maid jokes and no dating the robots in your home.