Opinion In Grok’s Ani companion, a regression

A Frankenstein redux it was not, but reports of one of the “companions” launched by Elon Musk’s GrokAI describing the billionaire as having “more money than brains” come close to the creator-vs-creation trope first encountered in Mary Shelley’s classic novel. That, however, is the least of the problems posed by the GrokAI companions unveiled this week by Musk. These companions include, for now, two animated characters: A “rude” red panda named Rudi — who dissed the billionaire after being prompted by users — and a “flirty” Japanese anime woman named Ani.

Of the two, Ani represents the far thornier challenge. Already, it has been flagged as potentially promoting objectification of women. If it feels like regression, it’s because it was not so long ago that public outcry forced Big Tech to roll back or modify the heavily gendered aspects of early AI voice assistants like Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana (Microsoft). Bestowed with feminine names and programmed with women’s voices, the initial versions of these assistants were heavily criticised for reinforcing harmful stereotypes about “submissive” or “eager-to-please” women. While Apple and Amazon added male personas in response to the outcry, allowing users a greater degree of choice in how they interacted with the digital assistants, Cortana was eventually phased out in favour of the gender-neutral Copilot. Ani, with her servile manner, offering to make users’ lives “sexier”, takes several steps back from that moment of accountability by Big Tech.

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LLMs like Grok become “intelligent” by trawling through vast amounts of data. That they’ve absorbed not just facts and figures but also human attitudes has already been widely documented — for example, a study of five popular LLMs published in June showed chatbots routinely suggesting that female applicants for a job ask for lower pay than male applicants for the same position. If the internet has long been unkind to and about women, creations like Ani will only make it harder to root out the sexism coded into it.