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Women are more likely than men to say 'please' to their smart speaker:
Here's an interesting stat from the Pew Research Center: more than half of smart speaker owners in the US (54 percent) report saying "please" at least occasionally to their AI assistants, with one-in-five (19 percent) saying please frequently. Curiously, the question of AI politeness also breaks down along gender lines, with 62 percent of women reporting that they say "please" at least sometimes, versus 45 percent for men.
Why that might be?
One possible answer is that men are generally ruder to women, and this latter category now includes AI assistants coded as female. Experts have long noted that the design choices for AI bots could have misogynist effects by reinforcing gender stereotypes. "Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are ... docile and eager-to-please helper," a report from the UN noted earlier this year.
It could also be that men just have different attitudes to technology. Culturally speaking, tech is coded as practical and manly, and contrasted with "feminine" disciplines. Studies show men feel more comfortable with technology, and express more interest in "mastering" it as a tool. These biases could be affecting the issue of politeness to AI.
Sadly, Pew didn't ask respondents why they felt they had to say please or not to these bots, so we can only speculate on the topic. But the broader issue is certainly an interesting one: do you need to be polite to AI assistants?
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday November 25 2019, @02:27PM (2 children)
Is it wrong to suggest that many societies teach males and females at a young age what their expected gender stereotypes are supposed to be and then when those children become adults, they continue to act either as an alpha/aggressive dominance or beta/passive subservience? Maybe I am biased, but I want to believe I was raised that way due to societal and marketing forces in the Westernized culture I grew up in. Also, people are worthy of respect, not some script powering a computerized voice.
There is also the entire "it's a robot/computer and I paid for it; do what I tell you" that many people have. Don't question it, just *do* it! And that questioning can be a lack of understanding the request, or an inability to hear the request clearly in noisy environment, or voice accent issues or an unusual string of word commands that might not trigger the appropriate responses. Or perfectedly executed commands that are completely wrong, because intent is not measured, only the perceived activation words.
Back to politeness, my girlfriend even has thanked, automatically and without thinking, automatic doors that opened for her. We've laughed about it -- but she clearly isn't thinking about the door's feelings or any of these other silly suggestions as to why men are from mars or women are from venus when it comes to how polite we are to unthinking machines.
This sort of automatic response from her is not too much different than what we might say to a cashier or anyone as we're wrapping up a conversation and nodding our heads absentmindedly due to thinking about something else, and saying "you, too!" as a closing statement to "you saved $X today with your value card!" because we expected a "have a nice day". It is polite to thank the person that opened or held open a door for you; it's less important who actually did it because its the act of chivarly that counts. not the actor being chivalrous. (Also, in a related event, a problematic automatic door that slams in your face is no less deserving of being cussed out for being broken, please and dude wtf aren't interchangable, but can be automatic depending on the circumstances...)
I would sooner put my fist through my desktop's monitor when the computer I put more time working on than in my relationships than I would verbally abuse an Alexa, but that has to do with the emotional betrayal of a stable overclock failing me, or raid 0 of nvme drives issuing a reset to raidport 0 because of the fact the video cards are drawing too much power and the game crashing and the save file is corrupted or not saved at all or... than it does with the fact that I truly believe that the deus ex machina powering the lights in my computer has some sort of agency and should be treated with respect or discpline for a lack of showing me that same respect when it misbehaves.
That said, it's incredibly creepy that researchers are measuring our mannerisms in this way and publishing reports on it. Can this stuff be used in court as evidence to accuse someone of beating their spouse because they weren't polite to the AI and so clearly this translates to how the accused treats people in person?
And because I might be less compromising with technology than I am with people, someone fearful of technology might construe this to mean that angry sounding, high volume nerds everywhere are dangers to society, when really all they want it to do is get the commands right in a noisy room and have given up all pretenses of being "nice" to the cheap smart speaker that can't hear you.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday November 25 2019, @03:19PM
Wrong to suggest? No. It's clearly part of it.
Is it all of it? I'd suggest beyond just cultural normatives of child rearing it goes much deeper than that. When the baby is born, what does it have to do in order to be fed, be cleaned (in the sense of diaper changes), most importantly for a newborn to stay warm, and to feel a degree of being cared for instead of abandoned? What has it already processed in the womb environment (like what chemicals/drugs, physical lifestyle, etc, has it endured)? The struggle for survival begins at conception and doesn't end until death, the only question being how much struggle (if any) one must endure. As an ungrounded hypothesis I'd suggest that a female infant that feels like it must scream to get it's needs met and lives a more deprived life might become more aggressive than a boy infant who has its needs met before it even opens its eyes (or learns that cooing and laughing gets those needs met more efficiently than a cry). This whole thing might be just a deeper and extended set of cultural norms of early child rearing, but the reality is that there's a lot more variability in how infant care is approached IMVHO. "Do you cuddle or let the baby cry it out?" just for openers...
Beyond those levels, there's the question of innate personality traits. How much of who you are is malleable, and how much might be the homeostasis of the way your brain chemicals must function compared to the person next to you? Does your brain become hardwired that using the word please works, or do you become like Wednesday Addams as played by Christina Ricci... "And what do we say?" "Now!"
I'd say the greater fear is that if a person is willing to be angry, rude, violent, or unthinking/uncaring towards an inanimate and unsentient object than why would one expect change when the object is sentient and living? Pouring out emotional baggage on something incapable of understanding it might feel therapeutic (it does for me!), but if there is no potential for reciprocity there then might a being capable of understanding be concerned about engaging in a relationship where there may be no such potential? Only a reliance that a person has empathy, and empathy is certainly not universal and may not be even a commonly shared trait from many studies I've seen. None of which has anything to do with you or your girlfriend, just that when you see someone else do something you might wonder where else the person does those things in life...
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:17AM
this study was strictly self-reporting.
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