Artificial Eye: The Modernist Origins of AI's Gender Problem

Abstract

In this essay I use AI to refer to task-oriented AI, since AGI has yet to be realized. Although the gender gap in AI is often discussed in terms of women’s unequal representation in AI-related industries and the need to encourage women and girls to “learn to code” and study STEM subjects, our digital worlds are increasingly shaped by gendered technologies that reify heteronormative gender roles and objectify women in the process. This essay presents a journey through the gender “work” performed by representations of artificial life—starting in the industrial economy of nineteenth-century Europe and continuing through the electronic and digital economy of the present—to illustrate how the feminization of sex robots (sexbots) and virtual assistants is part of a historical narrative in the West that foregrounds the entangled relationship between women’s bodies and technologies. I argue that the correlation between AI and femininity (Artificial Eves) is a constitutive feature of nineteenth-century modernity that continues to shape our interactions with AI today.