"Japanese women's language" and artificial intelligence: Azuma Hikari, gender stereotypes and gender norms

Abstract

The thesis aims to investigate how Azuma Hikari, a new Japanese virtual home assistant promoted as a "virtual girlfriend" targeted at single men, may adhere with her speech to dominant language ideologies and thus perpetuate stereotypes and gender norms. The paper also aims to analyze how this correlates to gender roles and gendered division of labor, and to understand to what extent women's language in AIs may reproduce dominant ideological views about "women's language". Further, since human beings have demonstrated a tendency to anthropomorphize machines and to treat social robots as fellow human beings, social robots’ role in influencing the way we see gender and gender appropriate language might be even bigger than we think.