Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity in AI Linguistics

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female stereotypes as they fulfill emotional labor and perform pink-collar tasks, whether through roles as therapists, query-fillers, or companions. This paper examines four specific chat-based AI --ELIZA, XiaoIce, Sophia, and Erica-- and examines how their feminine linguistic patterns are used to maintain the illusion of emotional understanding in regards to the tasks that they perform. Overall, chat-based AI fails to subvert gender roles, as feminine AI are relegated to the realm of emotional intelligence and labor

Chess as a Testing Grounds for the Oracle Approach to AI Safety

To reduce the danger of powerful super-intelligent AIs, we might make the first such AIs oracles that can only send and receive messages. This paper proposes a possibly practical means of using machine learning to create two classes of narrow AI oracles that would provide chess advice: those aligned with the player's interest, and those that want the player to lose and give deceptively bad advice. The player would be uncertain which type of oracle it was interacting with. As the oracles would be vastly more intelligent than the player in the domain of chess, experience with these oracles might help us prepare for future artificial general intelligence oracles