What unexpected appeared about the most popular profiles when propaganda researcher Wen- Ping Liu examined China’s efforts to influence Taiwan’s current election using bogus social media accounts.
They were adult, or at least that’s what they appeared to be. Fake information that claimed to be women had more followers, followers, and impact than feigned female ones.
” Pretending to be a woman is the easiest way to find credibility”, said Liu, an inspector with Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice.
It pays to be female, whether it’s online scammers, Chinese or Russian advertising agencies, or AI chatbots, demonstrating that despite technology becoming more and more complex, the human mind still remains surprisingly simple to steal thanks in part to age-old gender stereotypes that have migrated from the real world to the online.
FILE- Japanese people line up to voting outside of a polling place in Taipei, Taiwan, Jan. 13, 2024. ( AP Photo/Chiang Ying- hua, File )
It makes sense that having human-like traits would make false social media profiles or chatbots more appealing since people have long associated inanimate objects with genders like ships, for instance. As more words assistants and AI-enabled chatbots enter the market, blurring the distinctions between a man ( and a woman ) and a machine, questions about how these technologies can reveal and dispel gender stereotypes are becoming more important.
” You want to add some sentiment and comfort and a very easy method to do that is to get a person’s face and voice”, said Sylvie Borau, a selling professor and online researcher in Toulouse, France, whose work has found that online users prefer “female” bots and see them as more people than “male” versions.
According to Borau, people generally view women as warmer, less threatening, and more endearing than men. Men, meanwhile, are often perceived to be more competent, though also more likely to be threatening or hostile. Due to this, many people may be more likely to use fake accounts that pretend to be women, whether intentionally or not.
Scarlett Johansson, who claimed Altman told her that users would find her voice, which served as the eponymous voice assistant in the movie” Her,”” comforting,” when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was looking for a new voice for the ChatGPT AI program. When the company adopted what she called an “eerily similar” voice, Johansson declined to comply with Altman’s request and threatened to sue. The new voice was put on hold by OpenAI.
Feminine profile pictures, especially those that depict women wearing revealing outfits, lush lips, and wide eyes, can be another online entice for many men.
FILE- Scarlett Johansson attends the Golden Heart Awards, Oct. 16, 2023, in New York. ( Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File )
Users also treat bots differently depending on how they perceive their sex, according to research by Borau.
According to an analysis of more than 40 000 profiles analyzed for the AP by Cyabra, an Israeli tech company specialized in bot detection, female social media profiles receive on average more than three times as many views as male ones do. According to Cyabra, female profiles that claim to be younger receive the most views.
According to Cyabra’s report,” Creating a fake account and presenting it as a woman will help the account gain more visibility than presenting it as a man.”
The online propaganda and disinformation campaigns launched by countries like China and Russia have long used fake women to spread. These campaigns often exploit people’s views of women. Some appear to be wise, nurturing grandmothers who impart homespun wisdom, while others imitate young, conventionally attractive women who are eager to discuss politics with older men.
Researchers at the news website NewsGuard discovered hundreds of fake accounts last month, some of which featured AI-generated profile pictures, to criticize President Joe Biden. Some Trump supporters posted a personal photo with the announcement that they “wo n’t be voting for Joe Biden.”
While many of the posts were authentic, more than 700 came from fake accounts. One of the profiles, which the majority of the people claimed to be young women from states like Florida or Illinois, was called PatriotGal480. However, many of the accounts had profiles created by AI or stolen from other users and spoke in almost identical language. And while it’s impossible to say for certain who was running the fake accounts, they discovered numerous accounts with connections to countries like China and Russia.
After NewsGuard reached out to the platform, X removed the accounts.
There is a more underlying reason why so many phony accounts and chatbots were created by men, according to a report from the U.N. The report, which was titled” Are Robots Sexist”?, examined gender disparities in tech industries and found that greater diversity in programming and AI development could result in fewer sexist stereotypes being embedded in their products.
For programmers eager to make their chatbots as human as possible, this creates a dilemma, Borau said: if they select a female persona, are they encouraging sexist views about real- life women?
” It’s a vicious cycle”, Borau said. ” Humanizing AI might dehumanize women”.
