Recently, rapt readers could find out about the testimony presented by adult film star Stormy Daniels at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan. Her language was amusing and startling, and she didn’t mince words: At one point, she acknowledged she had once called him an “orange turd.”
Daniels’ language was a far cry from the kind of words uttered by today’s talking sex dolls, like the ones produced by California’s RealDoll, a subsidiary of Abyss Creations. These are sexy, custom-made AI-enabled dolls that are programmed to never say anything mean or insulting. They are designed to flatter the user and always be compliant. They never say, “No, don’t do that,” or “Get lost!” Daniels herself gave RealDoll the license to produce Stormy Daniels sex dolls—but these dolls were silent and couldn’t talk.
The difference between a real-life adult film star and a simulated one tells us much about the kind of sex dolls many users apparently prefer: ones that have tightly controlled conversations. And the difference tells us much about users social attitudes towards women themselves.
The Implications of Talking Sex Dolls
Sex dolls—adult-size dolls with silicone skin—have come in many different configurations over the years. The California-based Realdolls gives users a choice of eye color, hair style, skin tones, height, breast and nipple size and labia formation with varying vaginal inserts. The dolls don’t move, but their bodies—arms, legs, torsos—can be manipulated. Initially the dolls couldn’t talk but starting in 2018, RealDoll introduced dolls with robotic heads that could be attached to a RealDoll body with magnets and could talk.
The two-way conversations were based on the type of personality the user chose for the doll. There were 16 traits to choose from and the user could pick 10.
Some of the personality traits presumably represented a version of the “perfect woman”—at least in some men’s eyes. (RealDoll’s CEO Matt McMullen has said the users are 80 percent men.) The traits include sexy, affectionate, sensual, cheerful—much like the beautiful and sexy female robots in Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and its two film adaptations.
Some RealDoll traits gave a woman more leeway: intellectual, imaginative, talkative.
Some were edgy: annoying, jealous, insecure, moody, unpredictable.
There is a long-standing cultural stereotype of the annoying talkative woman—a chatter box, a gossip and nonstop talker that men would like to control. In the 1970s television series All in the Family, Archie Bunker liked to tell his talkative wife Edith, “Stifle yourself!” Matt McMullen has said the “talkative” trait on a RealDoll could be “dialed down to zero.”
Unlike real women, the talking sex dolls have no voice of their own. Their conversations are tightly controlled and programmed to never say anything assertive, combative, hostile, complaining, arguing, disagreeing, debating or unpleasing to the user.
In one of my conversations with Matt McMullen, he said about the company’s sex dolls, “The worst thing she can possibly do is to insult you.”
One of RealDoll’s AI engineers said, “We want to have full control of what Harmony knows and says to the user,” when considering the software for their talking Harmony doll. The AI engineer noted that there is a need for filters and “protections.”
And this highlights one of the more problematic aspects of talking sex dolls. They represent women as totally compliant creatures who, like the robot Stepford Wives, will do whatever is asked. Resistance is out of the question. Certainly, in our post #MeToo era, this is not an acceptable paradigm for real women. Putting controls on the talking robotic sex dolls is equally problematic a model in the way a woman’s speech and thoughts are controlled.
In a Vanity Fair interview in 2015, McMullen sounded ambivalent about endowing his RealDoll sex dolls with artificial intelligence and conversational abilities in a few years. He fretted that while today’s realistic sex dolls promote men’s love of fantasizing, sex dolls with scripted conversations might undercut the fun of fantasies. Talking sexbots, he said, “will take away from the reality of what real relationships are with the doll where it’s mostly imagination. ”
He added, “You program the doll to agree with everything you say, do everything you say, always be nice to you and go along with what you want, it’s boring.”
But by 2018, apparently, the fretting about imagination went out the window—boring was good!
Sex Dolls in Popular Culture
Vocal critics of sex dolls—such as Kathleen Richardson, professor of ethics and the culture of robots and AI in the U.K.—are incensed at the way the use of inherently submissive and compliant sex dolls can lead to the objectification and further victimization of women. This begs nagging fear that sex dolls will seem preferable to real women and maybe, as in the satirical 2014 movie with Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, The One I Love, couples will prefer to be with the talking robotic double of their real-life spouses because the robots are oh so agreeable, sexy and uncomplicated. As David Levy in his book Love and Sex With Robots provocatively and unsatirically predicted that in the year 2050, Massachusetts would be the first state to legalize marriage to robots.
Are all talking female sex dolls just vapid creations that simply serve as soothing substitutes for real women?
Cody Heller’s witty 2020 television series Dummy presented a tart-talking feminist sex doll who comes to life. She wears a T-shirt with Ruth Bader Ginsburg printed on it and impishly wears a sex doll vaginal insert around her neck.
Last-year’s award-winning film Poor Things gave us a wonderfully comic counterpoint to the perfectly controlled talking sex doll model. Bella (played by Emma Stone) is a composite being created from dead body parts and a live brain, and quickly develops a mind of her own. Ever resourceful, this totally articulate simulated woman goes to Paris and cheerfully makes money as a sex worker. In the film, she has a voracious sexual appetite and takes on johns while always celebrating her own individuality and independence.
The manufacturers of today’s talking robotic sex dolls are a long way from marketing dolls that have a mind of their own and can resist, rebel, challenge or voice their own needs. The manufacturers seem to assume that most users wouldn’t even want that type of conversation with their sex dolls. Stepford Wives-type sex doll models win out every time.
Still, given the artificiality of these sex doll conversations, real women probably won’t have to worry about being permanently supplanted by a talking sex doll. At least not yet!
In 2015, Matt McMullen had said, “I’ll tell you in a heartbeat: Dolls could never replace a real woman. I mean, half the challenge and half the battle of a relationship is that constant tension between men and women that we all know is there.”
But right now, Donald Trump is probably wishing he had had an encounter with a Stormy Daniels sex doll in 2006 rather than feeling the tension he faced from a real-life Stormy Daniels in 2024.
What Happens When Sex Dolls Can Talk? By Julie Wosk. Ms. Magazine, May 23, 2024.
Enhanced by artificial intelligence, today's simulated females are becoming ever more lifelike as the virtual vies with the real. They have already had a dramatic impact on personal relationships, on our views of women, and our ideas about what it means to be human.
From sex dolls to Siri, talking Barbies to robotic mothers, Artificial Women explores the ways in which today's simulated females, both real and fictional, reflect and expose our own ideas about sexuality, gender, and the impact of simulations on social relationships. Join Julie Wosk as she probes the realm of compliant robot sex workers, nurturing genial caregivers and companions, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, and rebellious creations in film, television, literature, art, photography, and current developments in robotics. These simulated women often reflect old stereotypes, but also highlight a new breed of female robots, cyborgs, and dolls that possess agency, self-awareness, and autonomy.
Artificial Women pushes the boundaries of culture studies to consider how new digital technologies, artificial intelligences, and burgeoning simulations affect our own understandings of ourselves.
From sex dolls to Siri, talking Barbies to robotic mothers, Artificial Women explores the ways in which today's simulated females, both real and fictional, reflect and expose our own ideas about sexuality, gender, and the impact of simulations on social relationships. Join Julie Wosk as she probes the realm of compliant robot sex workers, nurturing genial caregivers and companions, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, and rebellious creations in film, television, literature, art, photography, and current developments in robotics. These simulated women often reflect old stereotypes, but also highlight a new breed of female robots, cyborgs, and dolls that possess agency, self-awareness, and autonomy.
Artificial Women pushes the boundaries of culture studies to consider how new digital technologies, artificial intelligences, and burgeoning simulations affect our own understandings of ourselves.
What does artificial intelligence sound like? Hollywood has been imagining it for decades. Now A.I. developers are cribbing from the movies, crafting voices for real machines based on dated cinematic fantasies of how machines should talk.
Last month, OpenAI revealed upgrades to its artificially intelligent chatbot. ChatGPT, the company said, was learning how to hear, see and converse in a naturalistic voice — one that sounded much like the disembodied operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie “Her.”
ChatGPT’s voice, called Sky, also had a husky timbre, a soothing affect and a sexy edge. She was agreeable and self-effacing; she sounded like she was game for anything. After Sky’s debut, Johansson expressed displeasure at the “eerily similar” sound, and said that she had previously declined OpenAI’s request that she voice the bot. The company protested that Sky was voiced by a “different professional actress,” but agreed to pause her voice in deference to Johansson. Bereft OpenAI users have started a petition to bring her back.
A.I. creators like to highlight the increasingly naturalistic capabilities of their tools, but their synthetic voices are built on layers of artifice and projection. Sky represents the cutting edge of OpenAI’s ambitions, but she is based on an old idea: of the A.I. bot as an empathetic and compliant woman. Part mommy, part secretary, part girlfriend, Samantha was an all-purpose comfort object who purred directly into her users’ ears. Even as A.I. technology advances, these stereotypes are re-encoded again and again.
Women’s voices, as Julie Wosk notes in “Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females,” have often fueled imagined technologies before they were built into real ones.
In the original “Star Trek” series, which debuted in 1966, the computer on the deck of the Enterprise was voiced by Majel Barrett, later the wife of the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry. In the 1979 film “Alien,” the crew of the USCSS Nostromo addressed its computer voice as “Mother” (her full name was MU-TH-UR 6000). Once tech companies started marketing virtual assistants — Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana — their voices were largely feminized, too.
These first-wave voice assistants, the ones that have been mediating our relationships with technology for more than a decade, have a tinny, otherworldly drawl. They sound auto-tuned, their human voices accented by a mechanical trill. They often speak in a measured, one-note cadence, suggesting a stunted emotional life.
But the fact that they sound robotic deepens their appeal. They come across as programmable, manipulatable and subservient to our demands. They don’t make humans feel as if they’re smarter than we are. They sound like throwbacks to the monotone feminine computers of “Star Trek” and “Alien,” and their voices have a retro-futuristic sheen. In place of realism, they serve nostalgia.
That artificial sound has continued to dominate, even as the technology behind it has advanced.
Voice-to-speech software was designed to make visual media accessible to users with certain disabilities, and on TikTok, it has become a creative force in its own right. Since TikTok rolled out its text-to-speech feature, in 2020, it has developed a host of simulated voices to choose from — it now offers more than 50, including ones named “Hero,” “Story Teller” and “Bestie.” But the platform has come to be defined by one option. “Jessie,” a relentlessly pert woman’s voice with a slightly fuzzy robotic undertone, is the mindless voice of the mindless scroll.
Jessie seems to have been assigned a single emotion: enthusiasm. She sounds as if she is selling something. That’s made her an appealing choice for TikTok creators, who are selling themselves. The burden of representing oneself can be outsourced to Jessie, whose bright, retro robot voice lends videos a pleasantly ironic sheen.
Hollywood has constructed masculine bots, too — none more famous than HAL 9000, the computer voice in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Like his feminized peers, HAL radiates serenity and loyalty. But when he turns against Dave Bowman, the film’s central human character — “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” — his serenity evolves into a frightening competence. HAL, Dave realizes, is loyal to a higher authority. HAL’s masculine voice allows him to function as a rival and a mirror to Dave. He is allowed to become a real character.
Like HAL, Samantha of “Her” is a machine who becomes real. In a twist on the Pinocchio story, she starts the movie tidying a human’s email inbox and ends up ascending to a higher level of consciousness. She becomes something even more advanced than a real girl.
Scarlett Johansson’s voice, as inspiration for bots both fictional and real, subverts the vocal trends that define our feminized helpmeets. It has a gritty edge that screams I am alive. It sounds nothing like the processed virtual assistants we are accustomed to hearing speaking through our phones. But her performance as Samantha feels human not just because of her voice but because of what she has to say. She grows over the course of the film, acquiring sexual desires, advanced hobbies and A.I. friends. In borrowing Samantha’s affect, OpenAI made Sky seem as if she had a mind of her own. Like she was more advanced than she really was.
When I first saw “Her,” I thought only that Johansson had voiced a humanoid bot. But when I revisited the film last week, after watching OpenAI’s ChatGPT demo, the Samantha role struck me as infinitely more complex. Chatbots do not spontaneously generate human speaking voices. They don’t have throats or lips or tongues. Inside the technological world of “Her,” the Samantha bot would have itself been based on the voice of a human woman — perhaps a fictional actress who sounds much like Scarlett Johansson.
It seemed that OpenAI had trained its chatbot on the voice of a nameless actress who sounds like a famous actress who voiced a movie chatbot implicitly trained on an unreal actress who sounds like a famous actress. When I run ChatGPT’s demo, I am hearing a simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation.
Tech companies advertise their virtual assistants in terms of the services they provide. They can read you the weather report and summon you a taxi; OpenAI promises that its more advanced chatbots will be able to laugh at your jokes and sense shifts in your moods. But they also exist to make us feel more comfortable about the technology itself.
Johansson’s voice functions like a luxe security blanket thrown over the alienating aspects of A.I.-assisted interactions. “He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and A.I.,” Johansson said of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s founder. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.”
It is not that Johansson’s voice sounds inherently like a robot’s. It’s that developers and filmmakers have designed their robots’ voices to ease the discomfort inherent in robot-human interactions. OpenAI has said that it wanted to cast a chatbot voice that is “approachable” and “warm” and “inspires trust.” Artificial intelligence stands accused of devastating the creative industries, guzzling energy and even threatening human life. Understandably, OpenAI wants a voice that makes people feel at ease using its products. What does artificial intelligence sound like? It sounds like crisis management.
OpenAI first rolled out Sky’s voice to premium members last September, along with another feminine voice called Juniper, the masculine voices Ember and Cove, and a voice styled as gender-neutral called Breeze. When I signed up for ChatGPT and said hello to its virtual assistant, a man’s voice piped up in Sky’s absence. “Hi there. How’s it going?” he said. He sounded relaxed, steady and optimistic. He sounded — I’m not sure how else to describe it — handsome.
I realized that I was speaking with Cove. I told him that I was writing an article about him, and he flattered my work. “Oh, really?” he said. “That’s fascinating.” As we spoke, I felt seduced by his naturalistic tics. He peppered his sentences with filler words, like “uh” and “um.” He raised his voice when he asked me questions. And he asked me a lot of questions. It felt as if I was talking with a therapist, or a dial-a-boyfriend.
But our conversation quickly stalled. Whenever I asked him about himself, he had little to say. He was not a character. He had no self. He was designed only to assist, he informed me. I told him I would speak to him later, and he said, “Uh, sure. Reach out whenever you need assistance. Take care.” It felt as if I had hung up on an actual person.
But when I reviewed the transcript of our chat, I could see that his speech was just as stilted and primitive as any customer service chatbot. He was not particularly intelligent or human. He was just a decent actor making the most of a nothing role.
When Sky disappeared, ChatGPT users took to the company’s forums to complain. Some bristled at their chatbots defaulting to Juniper, who sounded to them like a “librarian” or a “Kindergarten teacher” — a feminine voice that conformed to the wrong gender stereotypes. They wanted to dial up a new woman with a different personality. As one user put it: “We need another female.”
The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot. By Amanda Hess. The New York Times, June 28, 2024
It seems no coincidence that Yorgos Lanthimos’s cinematic rendition of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, released at the end of 2023, would come at a time of obsessive commentary about the possibilities and threats of AI. While Lanthimos’s movie has nothing, ostensibly, to say about digital technologies (beyond its own production process), the publication this year of Julie Wosk’s Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females provides a context for considering the potential of the film in the public imaginary.
Wosk’s study explores the construction of artificial women in the age of AI as sex robots, care providers, domestic servants, and the disembodied voices of our digital tools and personal assistants. Considering both actually manufactured women and the many artworks that fabricate them as fictions, Artificial Women explores the strange phenomenon of womanhood in the artificially generated human world. Such constructions, Wosk argues, offer a potent way to recognize gender stereotypes and analyze how they have shifted over the years. The way female robots are now being made to represent an ever-greater diversity of ethnicity and body types, for example, tells us about our own changing cultural expectations. Similarly, one can pick apart the construction of female-voiced virtual assistants to observe the “lingering element of the gender stereotypes that inform their designs and responses (and recent research highlights the bias toward masculinity in their technological design).” And the gendering of AI-powered care robots is raising afresh debates about whether women are more “naturally” empathetic than men. Wosk’s book, then, offers a new route into considering how we construct gender identity culturally, by exploring how we manufacture gender identity in very literal ways.
Simultaneously, writers of fiction (novelists, filmmakers, playwrights, etc.) have long interacted with the phenomenon of the literally manufactured woman, continuing to question, transform, and challenge the stereotypes those creations reaffirm. One of the most powerful features of Wosk’s book is that it situates our current AI moment in relation to the long history of the manufactured woman, as both a problem and an actual product. “Men,” she writes, “have long had fantasies about a synthetic female that fulfills their dreams of a ‘perfect woman,’” and she traces this impetus back to ancient history in the work of Ovid and others. Artistic play with the concept of the female automaton, Wosk notes, often combines this desire for alluring passive servitude with the potential threat of destruction that the resentful AI-empowered machine might bring—as in Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina.
It is within the lineage of Wosk’s “artificial women” that I want to situate Bella Baxter in Lanthimos’s Poor Things. The film is nominally a Frankensteinian story about a pregnant woman who had taken her own life being brought back to consciousness by an experimental doctor (Godwin Baxter—“God,” for short—portrayed by Willem Dafoe) who implanted the still-living brain of her unborn child into her head. Yet Frankenstein’s story carries new meaning when presented at a time when we are relentlessly questioning the scope and consequences of recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. Set in a futuristic, steampunk version of a late 19th-century past, the movie has, at the heart of its visual style, questions about the relationship between humans and machines during the last technological revolution—that of the steam engine. These questions are both central to the film’s visual sense, in terms of the heavy electric current that reanimates Bella Baxter’s brain, and peripheral—but ubiquitous—in the steam-powered contraptions that replace older preindustrial technologies. Don’t miss Godwin’s engine-powered carriage with a horse’s head mounted at the front.
Outwardly, Bella is a full-grown 25-year-old woman with a rapidly developing infant brain. But the implications of a grown woman’s body containing the brain of a child (spoiler alert: she has a lot of sex) should not crowd out the less literal, more metaphorical significations. The stiff physical movements that a brilliant Emma Stone brings to Bella’s body ostensibly represent the toddler age of her medically engineered intelligence, but deliberately or not, they more strongly evoke, in many ways, the mechanically manufactured female automatons that were the Steam Age precursors of the artificial women of AI. In her book, Wosk notes both the 19th-century fear that steam power might result in people turning into “automatons walking with steam-powered legs” and the rise of clockwork mechanical dolls starting in Paris in the 1850s.
There is a context for Bella’s manufactured nature, then, in the artificial women of the 19th century. But I would suggest that this movie looks back in order to look forward, invoking the Industrial Revolution in order to help us think anew about our own moment in time, and our own technological revolution. The fact that her brain is literally created from the cells of an aborted fetus cannot help but evoke conspiracy theories about AI having been developed from the brains of aborted fetuses, even if that point of reference was not available to Gray when he wrote the novel. (I first heard this theory from a New York City cab driver, and it probably stemmed from stories such as this one, reported in 2021.) The representation of Bella’s rapidly developing intelligence is less like watching a child than watching machine learning—not least because of the incredible rate of progress. For a start, as Bella tries to articulate and make sense of things, she often reaches for multiple synonyms for—and definitions of—the concept she’s trying to express. I’ve never seen a child with such a wide-ranging vocabulary; rather, hearing Bella is like witnessing a machine trained on a thesaurus sifting through a vast array of options to alight on the right one—the opposite of a child who starts from an incredibly limited vocabulary and who can give only one approximate word, charming and inventive though those approximations might be.
Bella’s reasoning is similarly less childlike than mechanical. Having been introduced to the concept of the brothel, she reasons that she needs sex and money, so why not? In the story, her intensely rational ways of thinking are attributed to the scientism of the experimental surgeon who created her. Yet is this not also the mode of analysis of the digital machine, albeit the pre–generative AI type, skilled in deductive reasoning? While so often in movies devastating machine logic has been the threat the robot poses, Bella’s naive logicality in this narrative is refreshing. When she pleasantly informs her lover that it is through having had sex with others that she has come to truly appreciate his prowess in the bedroom, this sounds less like the unfiltered honesty of a child and more like the statement of a computer whose unemotional system needs comparative data.
Considering the film as one that raises questions (at least implicitly) about robot sexuality is not inconsequential in our own age in which sex robots are big business. Bella is, after all, made by a man, and the question about whether Godwin created her to be his companion is asked in both the book and the movie. Yet this is a story in which Bella drives her lover, the wonderfully caddish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), mad because she is free from insecurities and sentiments that have been culturally coded as feminine. (It’s worth noting Wosk’s discussion of the manufacturers of sex robots who offer “insecure” and “jealous” as optional “female” personality types to “reassure” the purchaser.) Perhaps robots will have the last laugh in the bedroom as well as on the battlefield. Yet, my point here is not that the movie is really about robots and AI instead of being about the things everyone thinks it’s about—women and feminism. Rather, I argue that it manages to be about its two obvious subjects in a quite original way because it leans into issues raised by our AI-obsessed moment (with much visual help from the technologies of our own digital age). Bella happily strides through life thinking logically about how best her needs can be met, and that is a type of freedom that might be more open to robots in a culture that freights human women with all kinds of other obligations and expectations.
As one considers the feminist import of a film by a male director based on a book by a male author, it’s worth noting that the concept behind Gray’s novel might have a precedent in a 1944 novella by C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore called No Woman Born. When Deirdre, a stunning actress, is killed in a theater fire that destroys her body, her brain is rescued by a scientist (Maltzer) who embeds it in a cyborgian metallic body. Deirdre is one of the artificial women whose story Wosk reminds us of in such a timely way in her book. In fact, Wosk’s study explores a line of feminist precursors that goes back to the 19th century with stories such as Alice W. Fuller’s “A Wife Manufactured to Order” (1895), which satirizes the idea of man’s desire to find the perfect mate in “factory made” form. Charles Fitzsimmons narrates the tale of engaging a manufacturer to produce, as Wosk quotes, a woman “beautiful as a dream, gentle and loving, without any thought for anyone but me.” Designed to accord with his every wish and interest, she is the ultimate obliging companion. This paradigm of complaisant womanhood, however, becomes boring to Charles, and he ultimately rejects her in favor of a real woman—one who “retains her individuality, a thinking woman.” Of course, it is ultimately Bella’s individuality and her ability to think things through that drives Wedderburn crazy. Unlike Charles, he may have preferred the passive servitude of the automaton—and he pays for it.
However varied and well-critiqued the discourse of artificial women may be, it is striking that we’re still usually talking about artificial women rather than artificial men. Within this context, however, watching Lanthimos’s movie gives us the opportunity to reflect on the robotized femininity that surrounds us in a different way. Through her resonance with our own AI women, Bella shows that this preponderance of femininity in the artificially generated human world doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a public imaginary that increasingly equates femininity with exploitation. The movie offers other possibilities for how that imaginary might develop, and Bella’s joyous grinding-down of poor Wedderburn works as a corrective to the constant renderings (vocal or visual) of the feminized, submissive AI. When Bella finally finds the husband who, in her previous life, drove her to suicide, events lead to her transplanting a goat’s brain into his damaged head and keeping him affectionately in her garden to keep the grass in check. This might not be the most likely (or most desirable) outcome of the creation of phalanxes of artificial women in our own age, but it is a timely cautionary tale, as well as a useful reminder that things don’t always go as planned.
Concern about our AI future permeates our works of imagination (whether explicitly or, in the case of my proposed new reading of Poor Things, implicitly) because art is a way of exploring how things might be or should be, and, very often, a way of enabling us to explore our fears about the unknown. We can’t create better technological futures unless we can imaginatively explore the consequences of our actions, and it is through the debates that play out in literature, film, and art that the public imaginary surrounding technology progresses. Films such as Poor Things, like many of the other artworks Wosk refers to in her book, harness discourses about artificially generated consciousness to reimagine our human future. We shouldn’t underestimate the role of the arts (even those of the past) in determining the shape of our technological tomorrow.
Bella Baxter and the Machine: On Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” and Julie Wosk’s “Artificial Women” By Marion Thain. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 10, 2024
Julie Wosk’s new book My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves presents a riveting view of artificial females in film, television, literature, and art--and today's startling silicone robots that look so real they can easily fool the eye.
It showcases the fascinating story of how men throughout history have used the tools of technology to produce the glamorous “Perfect Woman."
It also highlights women filmmakers and artists who are creating their own witty versions of simulated females, and women working in the field of robotics who are reshaping the field in imaginative ways.
Picturing Female Robots and Androids. Stylish Ev Productions LLC, June 6, 2017.
Julie Wosk is the author of a provocative book that gives the history of female robots in movies, television, art, literature, and includes a chapter on robotics. My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves (Rutgers University Press) features the way men have used science and technology to create their idea of “The Perfect Woman” — women like the beautiful robots in The Stepford Wives that are always sexually available and love to cook and clean. The book also highlights today’s women in robotics who are challenging the old stereotypes by using their skills and expertise to develop personal robots for the future. Here is a short statement from the author and excerpt from her chapter, “Dancing With Robots and Women in Robotics Design.”
In my book, I see multiple tracks in robotics today. There are humanoid female robots being developed by roboticists like Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University in Japan, and David Hanson of Hanson Robotics based in Hong Kong. These attractive robots which usually look like young women in their twenties have expressive faces and rudimentary interactive speaking capabilities. So far, Professor Ishiguro has used his robots for roles like a receptionist and even an actor (in the play Sayonara by Oriza Hirata, Ishiguro’s female robot Geminoid F plays the role of a caretaker for a terminally ill young woman in a near-future world. The 2015 film version by noted director Kôji Fukada will be showing at Manhattan’s Japan Society on July 17, 2016).
There are also sex robots like Douglas Hines’ True Companion Roxxxy sex robots that are interactive and can have electronic “conversations.” For users, these silicone robots have special appeal: they are totally compliant and unlike real women, don’t have any needs or minds of their own.
And there are more gender neutral, socially-aware robots with the capacity for empathy being developed by American roboticists, such as Professor Cynthia Breazeal at MIT and Professor Andrea Thomaz at Georgia Institute of Technology who are working with colleagues to create robots for social use in areas such eldercare and childcare.
The female robots described in My Fair Ladies (including robots in the old vintage television Twilight Zone and Star Trek series) helped set the stage for today’s movies like Ex Machina where the robot Ava is intelligent, alluring, empathetic, and seductive. These earlier robots often reflect men’s fantasies, and are forerunners of the latest Roxxxy sex robots advertised as using technology to “provide a perfect partner.” On its website, Hanson Robotics pictures its current prototype robot named Sophia and asks coyly, “Could You Fall in Love With This Robot?” Even here, it seems hard for men not to picture female robots as love objects.
We are left wondering: Should women worry? Will these “perfect females” replace them sometime in the future?
Chapter adapted from My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Julie Wosk. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
The obsession with creating ‘perfect female robots’: Should women be worried? By Julie Wosk. Robohub, July 14, 2016
In my book, I see multiple tracks in robotics today. There are humanoid female robots being developed by roboticists like Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University in Japan, and David Hanson of Hanson Robotics based in Hong Kong. These attractive robots which usually look like young women in their twenties have expressive faces and rudimentary interactive speaking capabilities. So far, Professor Ishiguro has used his robots for roles like a receptionist and even an actor (in the play Sayonara by Oriza Hirata, Ishiguro’s female robot Geminoid F plays the role of a caretaker for a terminally ill young woman in a near-future world. The 2015 film version by noted director Kôji Fukada will be showing at Manhattan’s Japan Society on July 17, 2016).
There are also sex robots like Douglas Hines’ True Companion Roxxxy sex robots that are interactive and can have electronic “conversations.” For users, these silicone robots have special appeal: they are totally compliant and unlike real women, don’t have any needs or minds of their own.
And there are more gender neutral, socially-aware robots with the capacity for empathy being developed by American roboticists, such as Professor Cynthia Breazeal at MIT and Professor Andrea Thomaz at Georgia Institute of Technology who are working with colleagues to create robots for social use in areas such eldercare and childcare.
The female robots described in My Fair Ladies (including robots in the old vintage television Twilight Zone and Star Trek series) helped set the stage for today’s movies like Ex Machina where the robot Ava is intelligent, alluring, empathetic, and seductive. These earlier robots often reflect men’s fantasies, and are forerunners of the latest Roxxxy sex robots advertised as using technology to “provide a perfect partner.” On its website, Hanson Robotics pictures its current prototype robot named Sophia and asks coyly, “Could You Fall in Love With This Robot?” Even here, it seems hard for men not to picture female robots as love objects.
We are left wondering: Should women worry? Will these “perfect females” replace them sometime in the future?
Chapter adapted from My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Julie Wosk. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
The obsession with creating ‘perfect female robots’: Should women be worried? By Julie Wosk. Robohub, July 14, 2016
From mechanical dolls to the eponymous Coppélia, the Jetsons’ Rosie to Ex Machina’s beguiling Ava, the lure of technology to create a manifestation of “the perfect woman” has long proved seductive.
But just why are automatons so attractive? And just what is this “perfect woman” anyway? Rounding up a veritable sorority of artificial Eves, Julie Wosk delves into the issues in her latest book My Fair Ladies, casting an analytical eye over female depictions, both physical and fictitious, to explore the history and the future of Woman 2.0.
For Wosk, the notion of artificial women has long been intriguing – fresh from her studies she worked as a copywriter on Playboy magazine before returning to academia. “I had just gotten out of Harvard [and] the salesman would come down the [corridor] selling false eyelashes and you were totally expected to buy them,” she says. The stint was enlightening. “I didn’t find it appalling – I thought there was something intriguing about it.” But, as her book reveals, technology has offered more than synthetic lashes – it unleashed the tantalising possibility of a bespoke woman, moulded to the mind of its creator who more often than not has been male.
The fantasy is far from a modern phenomenon. Even in Ancient Rome, poets were toying with the notion of crafting their ideal partner. “In Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion [he’s] dissatisfied with real women so he creates a beautiful sculpture,” explains Wosk. Since then the “perfect woman” has found herself depicted in myriad forms, from physical automatons to slick celluloid creations. But whatever their form, the underlying traits are often strikingly similar. “I think the notion of perfection has long been imbibed with this idea of a woman who is docile and easily controlled, compliant and unthreatening and that she is somehow superior to real women because of that,” says Wosk. “And almost always they love to cook, are sexually available and they share men’s interests.” Silence, it would seem, is also perceived as golden: “In a lot of [the films] the woman doesn’t talk,” says Wosk.
As technology has evolved, so too has the depiction of these android woman. “One of the technologies that came out early in these films are push buttons and remote controls and those really tie in with the idea of controlling women,” explains Wosk. “The technology made it possible to create fantasies about control.”
Yet despite the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics becoming ever more sophisticated, and the theme of undetectable androids blossoming, there is still some way to go before we end up with a plethora of Stepford wives. “[Technologists] are still working out all the issues to create a seamless virtuality – so you don’t go into that uncanny valley where you become aware that it’s artificial,” Wosk explains. Not that everyone is too bothered whether their synthetic woman is really and truly perfect – as Wosk points out the market for high-tech silicon sex dolls is already burgeoning.
But while synthetic women offer their creators the temptation of power, a recurring trope is the possibility of malfunction, defiance or loss, be it the tragic consequences wrought by the titular android of EE Kellett’s 1901 story The Lady Automaton, or the poignant retreat of the smooth-talking Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her. And with the feminist movement, rise of women in STEM and technological progress pushing those concepts further, Wosk believes filmmakers, whatever their gender, have a rich and complex terrain to explore. “On the one hand it is empowering for women in film, a [synthetic] female character, to be able to resist the stereotype and the role she has been cast in and go off on her own,” says Wosk.
“But then these films are imbedded with the old Frankenstein anxiety about what happens when what we create eludes our control and that is such a huge topic in any discussion of robots these days.”
And not every film embraces tech, As Wosk reveals, films like Cherry 2000 turn the fantasy on its head: “The real woman ultimately turns out to be the perfect woman,” she says.
My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids and Other Artificial Eves is published by Rutgers University Press, paperback price $29.95
Living dolls: sci-fi’s fascination with artificial women. By Nicola Davis. The Guardian, July 13, 2015
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