WASHINGTON: When disinformation researcher Wen-Ping Liu looked into China's efforts to influence Taiwan's recent election using fake social media accounts, something unusual stood out about the most successful profiles.
They were female, or at least appeared to be. Fake profiles that claimed to be women got more engagement, more eyeballs and more influence than supposedly male accounts. "Pretending to be a female is the easiest way to get credibility," said Liu, an investigator with Taiwan's Ministry of Justice.
Whether it's Chinese or Russian propaganda agencies, online scammers or AI chatbots, it pays to be female - proving that while technology may grow more and more sophisticated, the human brain remains surprisingly easy to hack thanks in part to age-old gender stereotypes that have migrated from the real world to the virtual.
People have long assigned human characteristics like gender to inanimate objects, so it makes sense that human-like traits would make fake social media profiles or chatbots more appealing. However, questions about how these technologies can reflect and reinforce gender stereotypes are getting attention as more voice assistants and AI-enabled chatbots enter the market, further blurring the lines between man (and woman) and machine.
"You want to inject some emotion and warmth and a very easy way to do that is to pick a woman's face and voice," said Sylvie Borau, a marketing professor and online researcher in France, whose work has found that internet users prefer "female" bots and see them as more human than "male" versions. People tend to see women as warmer, less threatening and more agreeable than men, Borau told AP.
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was searching for a new voice for the ChatGPT AI program, he approached Scarlett Johansson, who said Altman told her that users would find her voice - which served as the eponymous voice assistant in the movie 'Her' - "comforting". Johansson declined Altman's request and threatened to sue when the company went with what she called an "eerily similar" voice. OpenAI put the new voice on hold. Feminine profile pictures, particularly ones showing women with flawless skin, lush lips and wide eyes in revealing outfits, can be another online lure for many men.
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