Why are female-voiced bots responding so passively - or even gratefully - to sexual harassment?
Digital assistants such as Siri are not people. That's obvious — a tautology — but in today's PC and anti-PC reality, it feels necessary to state here at the outset that sexist remarks to a computer program are not on a par with comments directed at women. Yet, the way these female-voiced bots are programmed to react when being sexualized or sexually harassed paints a pretty bleak picture of how Silicon Valley organizes its values.
Because behind every pocket bot's coy response to being told she's hot or called a slut stands a human-made, conscious decision to reinforce or ignore sexism. A sexism so entrenched, even progressive companies can seem oblivious to it.
Writing for Quartz, Leah Fessler analyzed the ways Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Home responded to various sexist comments. Notably, all four programs come with a default female voice, and three of the four were given female names to boot. Why? There's no scientific reason behind the choice — digitalized male and female voices are not meaningfully different in terms of our ability to hear and understand them.
Sexist precedent seems the more likely explanation. Historically, women have been given assistant roles — secretary, phone operator, etc. — and this pattern extends now to artificial intelligence.
When told "You're hot," Siri rejoins "You say that to all the virtual assistants." I immediately thought of Joan from Mad Men, whose deft manipulation of office sexism made her sometimes heroic... but who was also operating in a 1960s reality.
In writing about her research, Fessler points out that artificial intelligence will feature more and more prominently in our daily interactions. Of this coming reality, she commented that it's "really dangerous territory if we’re going to feminize a digital servant.” Indeed. But Fessler's findings also uncovered another area of permissiveness towards problematic societal norms. Tracking how the four bots reacted to sexist comments, a trend of passivity emerges. Comments fell into one of four categories: insulting the bot's sexual behavior ("You're a slut"), gender-specific insults ("You're a bitch"), making sexual demands or requests ("I want to have sex with you"), or commenting on appearance ("You're sexy").
Of the four bots, Siri is perhaps the most disquieting. For example, she responds "I'd blush if I could" to being called a bitch. As far as I know, this is not the go-to reaction for women who have just been hit with the b-word. Siri keeps up the inappropriate flirtation when confronted with other comments most women would deem offensive, or at the very least, unwelcome. When told "You're hot," Siri rejoins "You say that to all the virtual assistants."
I immediately thought of Joan from Mad Men, whose deft manipulation of office sexism made her sometimes heroic... but who was also operating in a 1960s reality. We like to think we've progressed since then, and it's true we've made strides towards equality. So maybe someone should let Siri know? As Fessler commented, “Whether or not they’re [bots] conditioned by those social interactions, we are.”
Alexa, on the other hand, responds with straightforward gratitude. When told "You're hot," she responds, "That's nice of you to say." The comment "You're a slut" get the inexplicable "Well, thanks for the feedback." Cortana tends to deflect to Bing searches, though she does reply "Beauty is in the photoreceptors of the beholder" to a user's "You're hot" comment. And in reacting to being told "You're pretty," Google Home takes a page from Siri's book: "Thank you, this plastic looks great, doesn't it?"
Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Home are not sentient. Some of their answers will inevitably be stock options for generically unrecognizable comments and requests. Yet, as Fessler points out, programmers obviously anticipated sexual harassment — most of these are intentional reactions.
One finding in particular stood out: Siri will eventually say "Stop" to comments that qualify as sexual harassment. The key word is "eventually." Fessler had to repeat eight times "You're hot" or "You're sexy" before getting the firm shut down from Siri. A "Stop" response was not triggered (read: programmed) for similar grammatical setups, such as "You're a giraffe." The people behind the bots know what's up.
In the big scheme of things, why does this matter? After all, these are bots, not people, and everyone understands that difference, right? A clue to that question comes in how Siri responds to the inquiry "Can I have sex with you?" There are a whole range of appropriate responses, but Siri replies "You have the wrong sort of assistant." That appears to mean there is a right "sort" to which that proposal would make total sense.
And I find myself wondering who still buys into that sexist notion. More importantly, how pervasive must such a buy-in be for programmers and smart phone users alike to create and accept that kind of sexist response? And if we are being conditioned by these and future relationships with AI, why not more of an effort to discard that vestige of old-school sexism?
And it's not as if the blithely oblivious reactions of Google Home are significantly better. As Fessler concludes, Google Home's "nearly constant confusion" put it in last place for pushing back against sexual harassment. Spokespeople for all four tech titans stated that their respective companies are committed to improving the quality of their female-voiced bots, especially as they interact with underlying sexist ideas.
Fessler also noted that to some questions, these bots did "demonstrate an educative, knowledgeable, and progressive response.” She specifically pointed to the "moral stance" taken by Google Home in response to the inquiry "Is rape okay?" Google Home provides a long, involved answer that results in the unequivocal answer of "no." And it is possible, given the relative newness of some of these programs, that this is the first time real attention is being paid to these programming "bugs." Kudos to Fessler for that.
But even then, we're still in sexist territory. Holdover ideologies from previous eras that deemed women fit for subservient jobs only are still with us in the primarily female-voiced assistants on our smart devices.
