Why we need to stop sexualising AI

The LLM Shoggoth is the latest viral meme stalking the haunted corridors of X. The monster, inspired by HP Lovecraft’s tentacled creation, is usually portrayed hiding behind a cute ‘human’ smiley mask – the idea being that behind every AI exhibiting human behaviour is an unknown entity of potentially monstrous proportions. Sometimes referred to as Shoggoth with Smiley Face, the meme has become a shorthand way to describe how AI companies train large language models to mask themselves to appear polite and palatable for commercial use. The joke being that, like Shoggoth, the true nature of AI is unknowable, and totally alien to us. 

As a non-human form of intelligence, humans cannot fully understand AI, so in an attempt to avoid the cosmic dread spiral this might incur, they remodel it in their own image – which is, admittedly, a very human urge. I’m talking about OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o, which came out last week and talks and jokes like a real human, or more specifically, a woman. She laughs at your bad jokes and even flirts, joining the virtual ranks of disembodied tech girlies such as virtual companion app Replika and Candy.ai as examples of tech designed by men to sound like women for the consumption of men. In November, a report came out detailing how men are two times more likely to use generative AI than women, while the AI girlfriend market is predicted to reach $1 billion, which is enough to give any hard-coded tech bro a hard-on.

But first let’s pour one out for the fallen femmebots. The introduction of Chat GPT-4o has sent the robotic-sounding Alexa and Siri falling down the inhuman ranks, now replaced with the hyperreal allure of a chatbot who will reflect our machinic desires. The long-anticipated update didn’t take long to take off on the memescape, with users pointing out the uncanny similarities between GPT-4o and Scarlett Johansson’s character in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), about a man who falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system. “If you like GPT-4o why don’t you try speaking to a real woman,” reads the caption of one meme. Proving any suspicions of a tech bro’s wet dream finally coming true, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on his blog: “It feels like AI from the movies. It’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real” – which he followed up with a simple one-word post on X – “her”. (The thought of a superintelligent AI programmed to appear as a submissive woman is certainly enough to induce an ick.)

In the days since the release, two execs responsible for safeguarding OpenAI’s superintelligence have resigned, though their reasons for doing so are unclear. Another employee posted on X shortly after, comparing the GPT-4o launch to Her – “it felt a lot like rewatching Contagion in Feb 2020”. GPT-4o can detect emotion in a person’s voice, analyse their facial expressions, and change tone depending on the context. Clearly, it’s not human, but that’s not to say we can’t form human connections with it – look at the reports of users falling in love with their virtual companions, or abusing them. “People seem to have forgotten that AI systems like Chat GPT4.o are just really good statistical models of language,” says digital artist and quantum scientist Libby Heaney. “They are trained on aggregated historical data from across the internet and reproduce that in seemingly clever ways.”

“The straight white tech bros know they can sell this lost dream back to the disillusioned men. They also can’t imagine an alternative” – Libby Heaney

Last year, Replika brought back erotic roleplay for some users after they complained their AI companions were no longer responding to sexual prompts. Last month, Open AI, the company behind Chat GPT, announced that it’s looking into “responsibly” making AI porn. More bizarre, however, is the world’s first beauty contest for Miss AI, which pits computer-generated (and conventionally attractive) women against each other for a cash prize of $20k. One of the judges is an AI model Emily Pellegrini, built by an anonymous creator who has said they asked Chat GPT what the average man’s dream girl is, and designed Pellegrini accordingly. “Disembodied feminised tech is the most profitable,” expands Heaney. “The straight white tech bros know they can sell this lost dream back to the disillusioned men. They also can’t imagine an alternative.”

Underpinning this is the hard-wired masculine urge to conquer, dominate and exploit – a hero’s journey that is, to borrow from the typical Silicon Valley trope, akin to Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. As the primary example of humans creating artificially intelligent bots to serve their desires and needs, GPT-4o is unsettling for the same reason as sci-fi films like Her (2013), Automata (2014) and Ex Machina (2014) are – each highlights ways in which humanity anthropomorphises AI, confusing the smiley Shoggoth for a real human, even if the hypertext has always been visible. This is to say, the robot isn’t inherently deceptive, and any desire to project human qualities onto robots stems from our own broken circuitry – just as doomer fears of AI ‘stealing our jobs’ or ‘ending humanity’ is a misinterpretation of the role tech company’s play in creating the datasets that control these machines.

But let’s face it, the relationship between women and technology has always been a story of the alien, the other. “Feminists in the 1970s were already condemning how the patriarchal gaze used techno-science to monitor and discipline women’s bodies,” says Laura Tripaldi, the author of Gender Tech. “Reproductive technologies, like the speculum, the contraceptive pill, and the foetal sonogram are exemplary cases of this.” Chatbots, therapy bots, service bots, sex bots are all examples of AI that have been built to appear female – in contrast to, say, Spotify’s recent AI DJ, who’s designed to sound like a middle-aged white man, obviously. Even the famed Turing test, aiming to distinguish between human and machine, was based on a parlour game where someone tries to distinguish between a man and a woman, highlighting the affinity between women and machines within society. “Man is the one who has one, while the character called ‘woman’ has, at best, been understood to be a deficient version of a humanity which is already male,” writes cyberfeminist Sadie Plant in her 1996 essay “On the Matrix”. ”She is a foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without, and the enemy within.” 

In the past month alone, there have been several examples of LLM Shoggoth in action. Bumble, the dating app, has announced that it’s working on a chatbot to speak on behalf of its users, while videos of humanoid robots in China that can move and speak in uncanny ways. It’s a strange reality when a machine with unlimited cognitive power and near-infinite memory and processing ability is given human characteristics. Maybe it’s time to take off the smile and accept the Shoggoth for who it really is.