Gendered AI – Differences Between Female And Male Robots
By Erik Korsvik Østergaard, 19. April 2021
Is your artificial colleague or artificial work-place-coach going to be a male or female? It depends on what you want to obtain with the AI.
“Female bots are perceived to have more positive human qualities, such as warmth, experience and emotion, than male bots”
and
“We tend to bond better with bots that we perceive to be female.”
Female voices have been used for a long time e.g. in transportation networks like subways for providing input and information like “The train for Liverpool will arrive at platform 5 in 2 minutes”, whereas male voices have been used for commands like “Stand back from the closing doors”.
Now, this effect has been found in software robots and AI machines too, according to this study. Besides, it also documents why we tend to personalize our software and hardware robots and give we them names.
The questions with software robots at work are always: What is needed? What is possible? What is legal? And what is ethically good?
