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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 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...
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