You call out to your favourite AI voice assistant and ask it to play an obscure song. Unfortunately, it starts playing the wrong song, which leads you to verbally abuse it. After a brief pause, the AI responds submissively. Is there anything wrong with your behaviour? And does it matter that the AI voice assistant was designed, by predominately male teams, to sound like a submissive woman? Siri, Alexa, the Google assistant, and other AIs all have a default female-sounding voice. Why? Is it because we think of them as personal assistants, and we stereotype personal assistants as female? We often think of robots, as well as AI avatars and assistants, as mere “things”, but this is misleading insofar as many robots and AI personalities are designed to appear gendered, and we tend to bring our human gender stereotypes to our interactions with social robots. So how should we think about the gendering of robots and AI?

Join host Professor Paul Formosa and guest Dr Inês Hipólito as they discuss the role of gender in AI and robotics.

This podcast discusses Inês’s recent co-authored paper: Hipólito, I., Winkle, K., & Lie, M. (2023). Enactive artificial intelligence: Subverting gender norms in human-robot interaction. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 17. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1149303

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