When disinformation researcher Liu Wen-ping (劉文斌) looked into China’s efforts to influence this year’s elections using fake social media accounts, something unusual stood out about the successful profiles.
They were female, or at least they appeared to be. Fake profiles that claimed to be women got more engagement and more influence than supposedly male accounts.
Whether it is Chinese or Russian propaganda agencies, online scammers or artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, it pays to be female — proving that while technology might grow increasingly more sophisticated, the human brain remains easy to hack thanks to gender stereotypes that have migrated from to the virtual world.
Photo: AP
People have long assigned human characteristics like gender to inanimate objects, so it makes sense that human-like traits would make fake social media profiles or chatbots more appealing. However, questions about how these technologies reflect and reinforce gender stereotypes are getting attention as more voice assistants and AI-enabled chatbots enter the market, further blurring the lines between man (and woman) and machine.
“You want to inject some emotion and warmth, and a very easy way to do that is to pick a woman’s face and voice,” said Sylvie Borau, a marketing professor and online researcher in Toulouse, France, who found that Internet users prefer “female” bots and see them as more human than “male” versions.
People tend to see women as warmer, less threatening and more agreeable than men, Borau said. Meanwhile, men are often perceived to be more competent, but also more likely to be threatening or hostile.
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was searching for a new voice for the ChatGPT AI program, he approached Scarlett Johansson, who said Altman told her that users would find her voice — which served as the eponymous voice assistant in the movie Her — “comforting.”
Johansson declined Altman’s request and threatened to sue when the company went with what she called an “eerily similar” voice.
Feminine profile pictures, particularly ones showing women with flawless skin, lush lips and wide eyes in revealing outfits, can be another online lure for many men.
Users also treat bots differently based on their perceived sex: Borau’s research has found that “female” chatbots are far more likely to receive sexual harassment and threats than “male” bots.
Female social media profiles receive more than three times the views compared with those of males, an analysis of more than 40,000 profiles by Cyabra found.
Female profiles that claim to be younger get the most views, Cyabra found.
“Creating a fake account and presenting it as a woman will help the account gain more reach compared to presenting it as a male,” the report said.
The online influence campaigns mounted by nations like China and Russia have long used faux females to spread propaganda and disinformation. Exploiting people’s views of women, some appear as wise, nurturing grandmothers dispensing homespun wisdom, while others mimic young, conventionally attractive women eager to talk politics with older men.
Last month, researchers at NewsGuard found hundreds of fake accounts — some with AI-generated profile pictures — were used to criticize US President Joe Biden. It happened after some Trump supporters began posting a personal photo with the announcement that they “will not be voting for Joe Biden.”
While many of the posts were authentic, more than 700 came from fake accounts. Most of the profiles claimed to be young women living in states like Illinois or Florida.
However, many of the accounts used nearly identical language, and had profile photos that were AI-generated or stolen from other users. While they could not say for sure who was operating the fake accounts, they found dozens with links to other nations, including Russia and China.
A UN report said there is a more obvious reason why so many fake accounts and chatbots are female: They were created by men.
The report titled Are Robots Sexist? looked at gender disparities in tech industries and concluded that greater diversity in programming and AI development could lead to fewer sexist stereotypes embedded in their products.
For programmers eager to make their chatbots as human as possible, this creates a dilemma: “If they select a female persona, are they encouraging sexist views about real-life women?” Borau asked.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Borau said. “Humanizing AI might dehumanize women.”
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