The Gendered AI series looks at sci-fi movies and television to see how Hollywood treats AI of different gender presentations. For example, do female-presenting AIs get different bodies than male-presenting AIs? (Yes.) Are female AIs more subservient? (No.) What genders are the masters of AI? This particular post is about gender and goodness. If you haven’t read the series intro, related goodness distributions, or correlations 101 posts, I recommend you read them first. As always, check out the live Google sheet for the most recent data.
n.b. If you’re looking at the live sheet, you may note it says “alignment” rather than “goodness” in the dropdown and sheets. Sorry about the D&D roots showing. But by this, I mean a rough, highly debatable scale of saintliness to villainy.
Gender and goodness
What do we see when we look at the correlations of gender and level of goodness? There are three big trends.
- The aggregate picture shows a tendency for female-presenting AI’s to be closer to neutral, rather than extreme.
- It shows a tendency for male-presenting AI’s to be very good, or very evil.
- It shows a slight tendency for nonbinary-presenting AI to be slightly evil, but not full-bore.
When we look into the detailed chart, some additional trends appear.
- Biologicially- and bodily-presenting female AI tends toward somewhat evil, but not very evil.
- Socially female (voice or pronouns, only) tend toward neutral.
- Gender-less AI spike at somewhat evil.
- Genderfluid characters (noting that this occurs mostly as a tool of deception) spike at very evil, like, say, Skynet.
- AIs showing multiple genders tend toward neutral, like Star Trek TOS’s Exo III androids, or somewhat evil, like Mudd’s androids.