Monica… personal, fast and free

Obedient, helpful, obliging, caring, patient, subservient…we are not talking about women but AI assistants that pretend to be female and are always ready with information and desired action with just a click or a blunt voice saying hey. Of course, we can change their voice and have a male assistant but how many of us do it? Also, all digital assistants have been updated with a range of voices but the default voice that continues to remind us to wear our seat belts in our cars remains a female.

Every time we reach the dead end while following the directions given by these smart voices in cars, we are ready to blame her. She is at the receiving end. A lot has already been discussed about in-built gender biases and sexism in AI systems but in vain. We are back again with Monica, that is promoted as the ‘All in one AI Assistant, Personal, Fast and Free’. Yes, it is not a human being but a tool like Alexa, Siri, Cortana and as the name suggests it also pretends to be a female personal secretary with the most advanced AI models to search, write, translate, and do a lot more. 

To have such biases around us is not something new. We have grown up stereotyping women in certain roles where they have assisted us as receptionists and secretaries or greeted us with prerecorded messages. AI, a post-modern technology is simply reinforcing these traditional stereotypes.  By doing this we are pushing the future generations to a life visualised as revolutionary, however, not without our biases.

Changing these female voices to male is not the solution but making them genderless could be. It is time, we individuals squirm, question our own ideological biases, make space for diversity and individuality.  Monica could definitely be gender ambiguous unless we actually want to anthropomorphise it to be a female to suit our own misogynistic expectations. I often wonder do developers really think women possess these subservient traits or Monica is their dream woman?