"AI like a girl"
Sometime over the last 20 years, The Industry Decided that digital assistants were girls. Siri, Alexa, and oodles more from startups, typically with few human women involved in their development. Digital assistants, female; the developers and marketers of digital assistants, not so much.
I won't rehash the internet's worth of content that has already been written about this. These days, more companies offer configurable names, personas, and voices for their personified AI (though the defaults are often still girls).
Sexism aside, the thing I get stuck on is why we anthropomorphize AI at all.
Natural language means people
If you've worked with any kind of technical tools in the past, the most striking AI breakthrough of the last few years is that you can use regular human words to tell computers what to do, and they more or less do it.
Sure, some prompts work better than others, and wording matters. But fields like software development and finance have changed overnight. It used to be that experts in these fields had to literally learn new languages with bespoke syntax and formatting to do their jobs. These days, they can give computers instructions using natural language and get 90% of the way to results.
Natural language interaction models are powerful for getting work done. But language is also a central part of human identity. Language is what has historically separated us both from other species and from machines. So when we can talk to AI like we talk to people, we build a model of AI in our heads that says, "This is a person."
And unlike traditional software, people have personalities, emotions, and gender.
Grammar that makes people really mad
In 2021, former Florida Congressional candidate Lavern Spicer famously tweeted, "There are no pronouns in the Bible." She doubled down a year later with, "There are no pronouns in the Constitution." The last one is extra good since, you know, the literal first word of the Constitution is a pronoun.
There have been too many dumb comments about pronouns to list them all here. Obviously they have nothing to do with literal pronouns and everything to do with politics and fear. If you're over 30, your middle school English teacher did not expect this at all.
Pronouns have become a powerful signifier because a lot of beliefs get encapsulated in a few small words. When I use a pronoun to label someone, I communicate not only what I believe about their identity, but what I believe about their ability to decide their identity for themselves.
So in the context of AI that is increasingly becoming personified, pronouns are extra interesting.
Gender is a people thing
Cards on the table: As someone building a personified AI product, I hate gendered pronouns for AI.
When people are like, "Meet my assistant Kayla, she can help us find a time to meet," and Kayla is an AI, I get uncomfortable. Not just because of the obvious stereotypes at play, though that is part of it; culturally, pronouns are how we assign identity, and people usually assign women's identities to their AI assistants. The bigger issue, for me, is that AIs aren't people, so they don't merit this kind of identity at all.
If you think about it, it's weird that anyone who cares about pronoun use for real, living humans (in any direction, with any political orientation) can assign gendered pronouns to AI like it's NBD. But I understand why it happens.
When we interact with our AIs using human language, it's tempting to relate to them as humans. We assign them human personalities. For instance, AI has often been criticized as sycophantic, overly confident, or passive aggressive. These are human personality traits.
From here, it may not seem like a big leap to assign our AIs gender. On the other hand, gender is more than a stereotyped list of personality traits. It is intrinsic to our humanity, which is why people get so angry about how other people assert it.
The descriptivist linguist in me can see that I am going to lose this battle. Once enough people use gendered pronouns for AI, that's just how things work. Until then, I'll continue to hate it.
Kieran
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