According to recent data, approximately 21 percent of Americans use a voice-enabled device of some sort. Combined with current technological advancements that allow companies to create digital artifacts that emulate humans, referred to as Digital Humans, conversations around such topics as human-machine relationships and the humanization of machines are becoming more topical outside of speculative media.

Most of those popular voice-based conversation agents, chatbots, and digital humans are designed to be female. They often have female names, voices, digital avatars and are even referred to using female pronouns. This results in the tendency to attribute negative stereotypes to female coded chatbots and use derogatory terminologies, sexual innuendos and even verbal abuse when communicating with them.

I Want to Be Invisible was a research-creation project exploring our gendered relationship with machines and technological innovations through the development and use of Alternative Reality Games (ARG). The project asked the questions: Why are robots female? Are we capable of seeing them as humans? Will this change our relationship with them? Furthermore, how will our bias toward female voices and female bodies affect that relationship? This project aims was to use gender bias and the dehumanization of female voices to examine our relationship with AI and how we design it.

This project was funded by SSHRC Insight Development Grant

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This project was made with the help of the following contributors:

☆ Sk Sabada
☆ Alex Borkowski
☆ Daniel Rios
☆ Jayde Callejas
☆ Justine Angelopoulos
☆ Derek Manderson
☆ Amira Beaulieu