Sexism Manifested in Tech, Bots, and AI

We’re about to perpetuate sexism unnecessarily. Let’s stop it before it’s too late.

Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Well, it’s really cool. Machines are learning, on their own, and they’re doing all sorts of great things. Semi-independent technology is booking our travel, organizing our calendars, doing our shopping, helping manage our finances… I can’t even get online these days without reading about another self-driving fleet of vehicles. We can’t deny that the prospect of a Jetsons-like life isn’t at least exciting.

However, amid all of the excitement something very dangerous is happening, marketers are quietly serving up some seriously sexist bullshit branding. Powerful machine learning tech (the stuff that “does the heavy lifting”) are personified and branded as male while ancillary consumer-facing products are branded as female. For example, IBM has Watson and Microsoft has LUIS (Language Understanding for Intelligent Service). Note that LUIS is the one that is intelligent and understands, but doesn’t actually do the service. Nope, Microsoft seems to have left that job for Cortana. She’s the one consumers get to interact with. The Google search result for “Microsoft Cortana” reads “Meet your personal assistant.” You should also do an image search for Cortana and see what pops up.

We’re all familiar with other virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri (female) and Amazon’s Alexa (female). Did you know Samsung just bought Viv? I’ve never met a dude named Viv. Then there’s the scheduling assistant from x.ai named Amy (female) and Nuance’s assistant Nina (female) and the conciliatory chat bots Xiaoice (female), Tay (female), and Rinna (Japanese schoolgirl).

More recently I learned of AI from a company called Adgorithms that they’ve decided to brand as Albert. Their website states, “Albert was built with Artificial Intelligence in his [yep, his] core, incorporating predictive analytics, machine-learning, control systems and feedback, natural language processing, and other proprietary algorithms – to provide marketers with a self-driving solution for cross-channel (both paid and nonpaid) campaign execution, testing, optimization, analysis, and insights.” Forget for a second that that word orgy is a single sentence with nine commas and admit to yourself that that stuff sounds way too hard for a girl to do. However, when Adgorithms rolls out a reporting portal as a companion to smart Albert I bet they name her Alberta—she’ll be simple, clean, light weight, and always available.

Now, before you get you boxers in a twist, understand that I recognize there are male chat bots and male virtual assistants (e.g., Jarvis) and that there is likely some very strong software somewhere called Sophia or something. Not everyone is making these mistakes. However, we must admit that the increased personification of technology is providing us with a tremendous opportunity and so far we’ve messed it up. I’d prefer not to live in a world where the smartest technologies have boy names and the consumer services have girl names—that just doesn’t seem smart. We have a rare chance to steer an industry, a technology revolution really, in a direction that does not perpetuate current stereotypes or bias. I don’t know that my generation has had an opportunity quite like this ever before and we should do something about it.

-J. Rhett Frandsen