Wen-Ping Liu, a disinformation researcher, began investigating China’s attempts to influence Taiwan’s most recent elections by using fake social media accounts. However, one thing struck him peculiar about the most successful profiles. They were females; or so it seemed anyway. The fake “female” accounts had more eyeballs on them and received more engagement and influence more than the seemingly male ones.“Pretending to be a female is the easiest way to get credibility,” said Liu of the Taiwan ministry of justice.
It does not matter whether it is Chinese or Russian propaganda organizations, online scam artists or AI chatbots; it pays off to be a woman. This confirms that although technology becomes smartest by day, yet human brain remains impressively vulnerable for hacking due to age-long gender stereotypes which have crossed over from the real into virtual world. “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,” says Sylvie Borau, an online researcher based in Toulouse who has discovered that internet users prefer “female” bots as being more human-like than their counterparts with male characteristics. Women are generally seen as warmer, less threatening, and more agreeable than men are at least according to Borau who also adds that men often appear hostile while women might seem like they care for people much better. Consequently many people may somehow be consciously or unconsciously ready for communication with fictitious accounts impersonating females.
The CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman reached out Scarlett Johansson when he was seeking for another sound for ChatGPT AI program who told her he believed her voice which she used as the eponymous voice assistant in film “Her” would be “comforting”. However Johansson rejected Altman’s offer before warning him of suing if he continued with what she called an “eerily similar” tone saying,” I cannot do this.” At that moment OpenAI suspended the new voice.
Often, feminine profile pictures – especially ones depicting women with immaculate skin, full lips and wide eyes wearing revealing clothes – can be another bait for men online. An examination of more than 40,000 profiles found that on average female social media accounts generate over three times as many views compared to those belonging to males. As it discovered, female profiles which pretended to be younger were most viewed.
The UN report suggested another obvious reason why so many fake accounts and chatbots appear as females; they were made by males. The report also stated that increased diversity in programming and AI development would lead to less sexist stereotypes embedded in their products.
