According to recent data, approximately 21 percent of Americans use a voice-enabled device of some sort. Combined with current technological advancements that allow companies to create digital artifacts that emulate humans, referred to as Digital Humans, conversations around such topics as human-machine relationships and the humanization of machines are becoming more topical outside of speculative media. Most of those popular voice-based conversation agents, chatbots, and digital humans are designed to be female. They often have female names, voices, digital avatars and are even referred to using female pronouns. This results in the tendency to attribute negative stereotypes to female coded chatbots and use derogatory terminologies, sexual innuendos and even verbal abuse when communicating with them.
I Want to Be Invisible was a research-creation project exploring our gendered relationship with machines and technological innovations through the development and use of Alternative Reality Games (ARG). The project asked the questions: Why are robots female? Are we capable of seeing them as humans? Will this change our relationship with them? Furthermore, how will our bias toward female voices and female bodies affect that relationship? This project aims was to use gender bias and the dehumanization of female voices to examine our relationship with AI and how we design it.
Feminist point of view
looking at human/machine relationship from a feminist point of view. ie what will AI sentient looks like if we apply feminist frame to it, so instead of wanting to destroy humanity (as is in the case with most media tackling this topic) what will her reaction be
What else can we say?
The projects concerns the why femme voices and bodies are treated in digital spaces, but we do not want to reiterate the same point we always see around abuse, misogyny and sexual harassment. Rather the project looks at the quieter (but not less insidious) way femme are treated in digital spaces (microaggressions, discounting their opinion and expertise etc.)
Computer Says No!
Humans are not rational beings, we are chaotic, emotional, unpredictable and biased (among other things) so why should our machines not reflect that. The AI we build should be irrational, somewhat nihilistic but also reflect some of the positive traits of it’s creator (kindness, emotional intelligence etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAthdmujiA8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdXhr8pnV00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dp986zEefY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bibskx0LZhE
https://youtu.be/JSS_3hFVBE0?si=lUtcRp7upz8yDIyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqueWBipjsA
During the final phase of the game we released a trivia/chatbot questioner on the website that players can interact with. each week we released another set of 10 questions, with the questions and topics becoming stranger and stranger as the weeks progressed,