“We’re the brains, you’re talking about bodies”: discussing gender stereotypes in digital assistants

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand and discuss the issues that emerge when gender is attributed to current digital assistants, as part of an ongoing research on the relationship between gender and AI. resulting in portrayals of gender roles, ste- reotypes and archetypes. This paper focuses on the conceptualization and devel- opment of chatbots that ironically expose and portray gender roles, stereotypes and archetypes. It presents recent progress in our theoretical and analytical ap- proaches, addressing a tendency towards the feminization of current digital as- sistants, and examines current trends of development and justifications for this phenomenon, while debating common concerns regarding gender attribution in AI. It discusses how the questions addressed in our research are integrated into each bot’s personality and extends this approach to masculine archetypes and stereotypes, inspecting how they are portrayed by artificial intelligence, both in real life and fictional scenarios. In this manner, we seek to foster debate on how these entities reinforce and reflect common conceptions of gender back to us.