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Women are More Likely than Men to Say ‘Please’ to their Smart Speaker

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 25 2019, @03:44AM   
from the better-safe-than-sorry dept.

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow4408.

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?

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Original Submission

• Re:Social norms (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:03AM

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:03AM (#924751) Homepage

  If I had kids, I'd absolutely not want to confuse them by teaching them to waste time and effort being politen to a machine that has no need for such noise in its input signal. Save the politeness for the humans who are not simply following programming and actually doing something for you at some cost (even if that's just time) to themselves.
  
  Yes, you've guessed my gender.
  
  Note, however, that if assistants were being programmed to adapt their strategies depending on how well that satisfy your requests, and that feedback was in via the mechanism of one following up with a "thank you", or a "dafuq"/"nevermind", then yes, I'd absolutely teach them to get the most out of the system by giving such feedback. However, that's not being polite.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  Parent

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