The Gendered AI series looks at sci-fi movies and television to see how Hollywood treats AI of different gender presentations. For example, are female AIs generally shown as smarter than male AIs? Are certain AI genders more subservient? What genders are the masters of AI? This particular post is about gender and category of intelligence. If you haven’t read the series intro, related category distributions, or correlations 101 posts, I recommend you read them first. As always, check out the live Google sheet for the most recent data.
What do we see when we look at the correlations of gender and level of intelligence? First up, the overly-binary chart, and what it tells us.
Gender and AI Category
You’ll recall that levels of AI are one of the following…
- Super: Super-human command of facts, predictions, reasoning, and learning. Technological gods on earth.
- General: Human-like, able to learn arbitrary new domains to human-like limits
- Narrow: Very smart in a limited domain, but unable to learn arbitrary new domains.
The relationships are clear even if the numbers are smallish.
- When AI characters are of a human-like intelligence, they are more likely to present gender.
- When AI characters are either superintelligent or only displaying narrow intelligence, they are less likely to present gender.
- My feminist side is happy that superintelligences are more often female and other than male, but it’s also such small numbers that it could be noise.
If you check the details in the Sheet, you’ll see the detailed numbers don’t reveal any more intense counterbalancing underneath the wan aggregate numbers.