Where we are in this series: I just finished showing how AI in sci-fi presents gender, what bodies it is given, how subservient it is, the gender presentation of the masters of AI, how germane the gender of the AI was to the plot of the stories in which they appear, how good or evil those AIs were, and what category of AI they seemed to be. Next up we’re going to look at the correlations of those distributions to gender, but first a fun fact from the survey.
There are all of three AI characters who elect their gender presentation for some reason other than deception.
1In “The Offspring” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data builds an adult child named Lal. Data gives Lal the opportunity to pick their gender, and Lal picks female.
2Holly, the AI in Red Dwarf begins presenting male and after a bit reveals that she would rather present as female. Later, she is destroyed and rebuilt from an earlier copy, when the AI presents as male again, but notably, this was not Holly’s decision.
3The Machine, from Person of Interest (shout-out: it won the award for best representation of the AI science in the Untold AI series, and a personal favorite) chooses in the last season to adopt the voice of its main devotee, Root, who is female.
Though this is a very small sample inside our dataset, it is notable in light the male bias that AI characters show, by these examples,…
…when an AI chooses a gender presentation, it is always a female.
Not quite “picking a gender”
There are a handful of other times an AI winds up with a gender presentation that can not quite be said to be a matter of personal preference.
- If you’re wondering about the Maschinenmensch from Metropolis, its gender is not a choice, but something assigned to it by the mad scientist Rotwang as part of a plot of deception.
- If you’re thinking of Skynet, from the Terminator series, it has no presenting gender until Terminator Salvation. In that film the AI chooses to mimic a female character, Dr. Kogan, because “Calculations confirm Serena Kogan’s face is the easiest for [Marcus] to process.” It assures him that if he preferred someone different, Skynet could mimic another person. So this is not picking gender for an identity reason as much as a mask for efficacy.
- Later in Terminator Genisys, Skynet is embodied as a man, the T-5000 known as “Alex,” but this appears to be the opportunistic colonization of an available body rather than a selection by the AI.
- The Puppet Master from Ghost in the Shell is similarly an opportunistic colonization of a female cyborg. There might be some selection process in the choice of a victim, but that evidence is not on screen.
- In Futurama, Bender has also opted several times to be female, but it is for the express purpose of getting something out of the deal, such as competing in the Robo-Olympics or to play a heel character in wrestling. By the end of each episode, he’s back to being his old self again.
If you know of additional or even counterexamples, let me know so I can add them to the database. But as of right now, the AI future looks female.