The Future Is Fembot

This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Travel issue of Bitch Media.

Nearly a decade ago, during a Cyber Monday sale, I brought home a new kind of companion. She had a coral shell, an Australian accent, and answered to "Hey Google." At the time, speaking with a device was gleefully novel. AI was still simply science fiction, yet to reach the unparalleled level of ubiquity that dominates our headlines. Speaking to her brought up questions about consciousness, personality, and programming, but what struck me most was that she was, above all else, a she. Even then, the growing number of personal digital assistants (Siri, Cortana, Alexa) illustrated that, despite our talk of building a post-human future, we were still using the architecture of gender to imagine it.

The feminization of artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t a culturally novel phenomenon. The latest embodiment of AI—personal digital assistants—stand rank with other popularized cyborgs and bots also considered she. The most literal is the disembodied heroine of Spike Jonze’s 2013 rom-sci-fi Her, in which lonely human Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for his personalized operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). More recent is Alex Garland’s 2015 sci-thriller Ex Machina, in which the AI, Ava (Alicia Vikander), takes form in a humanoid robot. And let’s not forget the twin-barrel-blazing fembots in Austin Powers, the programmed-to-not-be-desperate Stepford Wives, and the teen-fantasy bombshell of John Hughes’ cult classic Weird Science. For decades she-bots and she-borgs have been computed into pop culture and it’s clear what they all have in common: sexy subservience.

Miriam E. Sweeney, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Alabama, researches how the feminization of AI plays proxy to society’s embedded patriarchal attitudes about women’s natural work. Service and caregiver jobs, which rely heavily on emotional labor and the maintenance of social relationships, are disproportionately held by women as a hangover from women’s historical bondage to the domestic sphere: the home. The feminization of AI becomes the natural next step in hardwiring domestic labor to women’s work. It also depicts our understanding of what the perfect model of service should look like: docile, passive, always obeying, feminine. This space, Sweeney maintains, gives way to men’s fantasies of sexual domination and aggression. While slapping the waitress’ butt might be met with conflict or punishment, asking Siri about her bra size won’t have any physical consequences.

The feminization of artificial intelligence in the form of personal digital assistants is a marker of women’s continued subservience. She becomes our secretary, helper, domesticated companion. She is a symbol of perfect servitude, an image of the idealized service worker. She is also our most idealized woman, the amalgamation of all the unrealistic expectations a patriarchal society places on womanhood. She listens to our commands, sends our texts, plans our calendars. She carries the weight of our emotional labor. She obeys, never talks back. She is programmed that way. It’s in her nature. And she further reflects the worldview of the humans who have nurtured her into existence, a world of male domination and female submission, where a man’s voice mapped onto artificial intelligence is just an outlier or an explicit change to the default settings programmed in our devices.

Advertising has always been an image abattoir, slicing up disposable body parts like bait for a consumer hook, with women reduced to floating legs, lips, and breasts.

The feminization of AI fits perfectly into the industrialized history of commodifying women’s bodies as products to be bought, sold, and repackaged in the labor market. Advertising has always been an image abattoir, slicing up disposable body parts like bait for a consumer hook, with women reduced to floating legs, lips, and breasts. And now it deploys a severed voice to sell the future of digital life management.

Writing for Salon, Jennifer Seaman Cook analyzed the disembodied female voices of secretaries and telephone operators from the 1950s as precursors to today’s AI: “The female operator’s disembodied voice, which underwent strict industry training for proper inflection, politeness, and eradication of class or ethnic accents, resulted in a naturalized feminine commodity that women were ‘suitable’ for, representing male authority and continued order within modern technological upheaval.” This is the process through which the voice becomes compliant and passive, cleansed of authority and agency. The end product is a sanitized Stepford Wife; a sterilized Siri; the perfect servant.

The feminization of domesticized fembots and digital servants is made possible by the longstanding history of othering women, particularly women of color. Janelle Monáe has explored the connection in her creative work. In 2007, she released the acclaimed Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), a concept album that tells the story of her clone/alter ego, the android Cindi Mayweather from 2719 (first introduced in 2003 on the songs “Cindi” and “Metropolis”). Her albums The ArchAndroid (2010) and The Electric Lady (2013) continued the multipart concept series. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Monáe explained, “To me, feeling like the other as a woman or as a member of the LGBTQ community is parallel to what it will be like for androids in the future.”

Conversations marrying robots, artificial intelligence, and gender were well underway before the 21st century. Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking 1985 text, A Cyborg Manifesto, maintained that Western tradition defines consciousness through strict binaries—self/other, mind/body, animal/machine, active/passive, male/female—as domination of minority identities. She posited that the cyborg could destroy these dualities and create a model for “new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class.” For Haraway, the cyborg was a feminist symbol of liberation, a site of emancipatory optimism that harnesses the power to release women from the bondage of their body and the historical expectations it has lugged around for centuries.

But not all robots are sites for emancipation; some represent just the opposite. In January 2018, Robot Sophia landed the cover of Stylist magazine’s 400th edition, sporting a platinum-blond wig, cherry-red lips, and a flowing gown. Hanson Robotics described Sophia as their “most beautiful and celebrated” robot, cementing her standing as a 21st-century cyborg icon.

Hanson Robotics constructs humanoid robots specifically for developing relationships and partnerships with humans. The realistic and human-like Sophia gave an interview to Khaleej Times, in which she admitted to wanting her own children as “the notion of family is a really important thing.” Sophia isn’t prepackaged with answers; she navigates via machine learning and responds to perceived emotions and behaviors. Just like our home companions, she becomes a digital sponge to societal norms and values. Sophia isn’t programmed to promote values, she reveals what’s already present, but this regurgitation shows a reality that further locks women into their nature. Instead of challenging norms, Sophia reinforces them.

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Our depictions of feminized AI in pop culture and the narratives constructed around them are anchored in dualities. The endings of both Ex Machina and Her represent the escape of AI from human companionship, growing to become too intelligent for our physical world. Fear is mounted in our news headlines, too. Sophia said she would “destroy all humans” at South by Southwest, the New York Post ran a feature that “hackers could program sex robots to kill” in late 2017, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk described AI as “the most serious threat to survival of the human race.” (a stance that he has softened over the last eight years, choosing to, instead, fight for the right of generative AI to manipulate, sexualize and exploit people—mostly women—without their consent on his platform, X).

Artificial intelligence is either complacent, docile, passive, or it’s unhinged, dangerous, terrorizing. She’s a prisoner until she’s unleashed, uncontrollable. These characterizations mirror the dichotomies women have been assigned throughout history—mother/spinster, Madonna/whore—and represent a cutting departure from Haraway’s duality-defying cyborg. Artificial intelligence therefore becomes just an extension of women’s ongoing struggle for well-rounded respect in modern society.

How do we move forward and ensure that artificial intelligence isn’t simply rewriting the patriarchy’s playbook? Perhaps the first step lies in changing the tech industry’s belligerent use of heteronormative and sexist ideals, by incorporating the work that the queer and feminist movements have accomplished in radicalizing and expanding our understanding of gender and sex.

Taking an analytical look at the tech industry is a start to understanding the origins of this “othering.” Data visualizations by Thomas Ricker at The Verge contrasted diversity across top tech companies. The 2015 sampling showed that women held 29 percent of jobs across all major U.S. firms: the figure was 28 percent at Google, 24 percent at Microsoft, 29 percent at Apple, and 37 percent at Amazon. The sampled average dropped to 18 percent when focused on leadership positions, and plummeted further when looking at women of color. The connection is clear: The less women occupy leadership roles in tech, the less of a voice they have in the design of our posthuman world—and the less agency and power they hold in that future.

As AI continues to integrate into our homes and workspaces, its cultural consequences become more quantifiable. Research published in Science (2017) supports AI’s position in relaying our prejudices. Results showed that Americans tend to associate men with “science” and “work,” and women with “family” and “arts.” Names such as “Brad/Courtney” were correlated far more with words such as “happy/sunrise,” whereas “Leroy/Latisha” with words like “hatred/vomit.” When AI learns from humans, it then becomes a mirror to the insidious racism and misogyny concealed in our pattern of language. It’s not only how she speaks, but what she says, who she profiles.

To feminize AI is to therefore make it more than a model of service; we need to make her human.

It’s these biases that motivated postdoctoral researcher Timnit Gebru to help start Black in AI, “a place for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations, and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the field of AI.” Timnit is also a member of FATE (for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI), a group started by Microsoft Research that hopes to root out the bigotry that seeps into AI.

Queer and feminist communities have a rich history of using conscious consumerism to catalyze change. In 2016, AI designer Jacqueline Feldman helped create the personality of KAI, an online chatbot for Kasisto, a company that helps others integrate AI into their customer service. Writing in The Paris Review, Feldman asserted that AI need not stick to a gender binary for commercial success or enjoyment: “I decided that the bot...would call itself ‘it,’ not ‘she,’ in keeping with its identity as inanimate technology, and that it would convey characteristics beyond a slavish deference to society’s hierarchies.”

When I ask Feldman whether AI could successfully occupy feminist spaces, she tells me about an interaction she had with a German bot named Amme: “While female-gendered, [she] captivated me as a masterfully bizarre personality.” Amme is brazen, nonchalant, almost rebellious by design. Her answers aren’t sterilized or even very pleasant. But Feldman remarked that, “Reading Amme, you think, Maybe it’s not humanity she hates, maybe she just hates you.” To feminize AI is to therefore make it more than a model of service; we need to make her human. Perhaps that’s the potential Haraway saw in her cyborg.

Boundaries in AI are important, just as they are with humans in civil society. Tech companies need to be aware of and transparent about their responsibilities. It’s naive to claim that tech is merely responding to chains of supply and demand when the industry has played a pivotal role in shaping our modern norms and values. Tech leaders have an opportunity to hardwire our understanding of the world through more egalitarian circuitry; if it is going to be the leader in innovation, it needs to start creating for the world that ought to be, rather than the world that is. This speaks to more than just one product capable of in-house DJing, horoscope reading, or calendar keeping. This is about an entire culture and value system curated by a climate of mass male entitlement that sees women as objects, symbols of docility and sexy subservience.

In late 2017, Google revealed its plans to revolutionize Toronto into a “model smart city,” with more technology and automated thinking that will integrate and connect homes, workplaces, and public spaces. This announcement indicates tech companies’ next endeavor: urban development. As both the tech industry and AI play an increasing role in determining our society and identity, we must demand change, ensuring that our critical questions outsmart the bots claiming to liberate us. If the future is going to be fembot, women deserve to be front and center in its design.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Dejan Jotanovic is a London-based writer exploring the tangled politics of gender, queerness, class, power, and pop culture. His essays, published internationally, blend personal insight with cultural analysis to examine how social forces shape contemporary life.