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Ed Finn’s remarks on the performance of gender of virtual assistants, specifically “the predominance of female voices” in digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, made me realize just how engrained and propagated these ideas are in day to day life. In the video below, you see Jamie Foxx interacting with Siri in what seems to be a flirtatious encounter. To have such a commercial aired across the globe seems like a smart business move – who wouldn’t want to buy something that not only made your life a little easier by, for example, setting reminders for you, but also helped to boost your confidence by making similar, flirtatious comments?
In the article “How We Trained AI to be Sexist” by Kerry Davis, Davis highlights the work of Jacqueline Feldman, the mastermind behind MyKai — a genderless artificial intelligence digital assistant. Feldman writes all of the Kai bot’s interactions — making sure that the comment it makes are as non-complacent to harrassment as possible. She makes sure to call the Kai an it, not a she. The development of the Kai bot is an important move for the future of digital assistants — it is a reflection of company values just as much as it is a reflection of the need for change in our society.
If the idea of a genderless digital assistant does not spread throughout the artificial intelligence world, what does the continued propagation of gender performance in artificial intelligence mean for the future image of females and the role females play in everyone’s day to day life?
Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.