Bots and Gender
Some thoughts on the role of gender in bot interactions.
Recently I was listening to the This Is Product Management podcast featuring Dennis Mortensen, Founder of x.ai. During the discussion, Mortensen continually referred to Amy Ingram, the female-gendered persona of their meeting booking AI.
Though my invite for x.ai hasn’t gone through yet (*cough*), I was already aware that they give you the opportunity to assign a gender to your personal assistant during the on-boarding process. Therefore, your assistant can either be called Amy or Andrew, depending on your preference.
While I appreciate that you’re given an option in this scenario — many other personal assistant apps don’t give the user a choice — this led me down a long mental road thinking about gender, artificial intelligence, and bots.
Featured CBM: Why People Treat Bots Like People
Specifically, perhaps now is the time to focus on using a non gender-specific pronoun (ze/yo/ve etc) to describe artificial intelligence, instead of using outdated gender norms. But maybe this is problematic in ways I don’t understand, specifically for human people who consider themselves gender-fluid or non/differently gendered. My feeling is that lumping artificial intelligence and a specific minority group of people is a bad idea.
So where does that leave us? Gendering artificial intelligence makes it easier for us to relate to them, but has the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing gender stereotypes.
It feels like now is the time to have these conversations, as we’re increasingly conversing and interacting with intelligent agents as part of our daily lives. Very curious to hear what other people in the community think! Please let me know in the comments. Advance apologies if my terminology in this post is somehow incorrect or problematic; happy to edit based on feedback.
For more on how humans interact with bots, check out I Was an Undercover-Bot For 2 Months. Here is What I Learned
Veronica is a podcaster, writer, and bot/AI enthusiast. Currently looking for product management work in the Bay Area. She’s also an admin at botmakers.org, and sometimes helps @botwikidotorg figure out what to tweet. Come join us!
