One news outlet chose the image below to illustrate an article about a study that investigated whether people reacted differently to robots depending on whether they were black or white: There is, unfortunately, no shortage of examples of this phenomenon. Looking at this tweet from Pelican Books, it's obviously questionable whether a robot holding a book on a silver platter is the best way to illustrate a book that claims to be a ‘mythbusting guide to AI.’ Even ignoring that decision, however, we still have to ask why the robot needs to be sexualised: why does it have ‘breasts’? Why does it have a smirk and a ‘seductive’ gaze? And, moreover, why does the promotional material for a book about AI need to picture it being presented on a silver platter by a female servant? One of the most common ways that pictures of robots are awful is through absurd sexualisation of the robots and perpetuation of gender stereotypes: and just generally cringy-looking robots.robots performing ridiculous activities.absurd sexualisation & perpetuation of gender stereotypes.So what makes a robot picture terrible? Well, there seem to be a few typical ways in which things can go wrong, so here is a non-exhaustive list of the main offenders: As such, let us now turn to the second phenomenon: terrible robots. At the same time, the fact that the article only talks about forms of ‘AI’ which are essentially just fancy data-driven computer programs means that there is something quite misleading about making the connection to sci-fi robots like R2D2 or even to existing robots like Nao.įinding ‘pure’ examples of this category of ‘inappropriate placement of okay robot picture’ is quite difficult, however, because in addition to being inappropriately placed, pictures of robots tend to be really, really terrible. In fact, the robots in the first and third examples (R2D2 from Star Wars and a programmable humanoid robot called Nao) are pretty cool robots. In these three examples, there is no real problem with the robot picture itself it’s rather its placement next to an article or discussion that has nothing to do with robots. Here are a couple of examples:Īn article about AI and insurance (no robotics):Ī tweet about AI and insurance (again, no robotics): The typical example consists of a news article about some topic with an artificial intelligence component to it, but nothing to do with robotics, being illustrated by a picture of a (usually) humanoid robot. Such image-text combinations are in themselves harmless, and often quite hilarious for how misguided they are. , a topic which in this case has nothing to do with robotics, at least in the physical sense. What we see in the image above is a picture of a (very famous) robot being used to illustrate an article about small and medium enterprises (SMEs) Let’s begin with the more straightforward of the two: inappropriate robots. We explicitly say inappropriate and/or terrible because we are, in fact, dealing with two separate (albeit usually intersecting) phenomena. Along with the ubiquitous Terminator images, these inappropriate and/or terrible pictures of robots are arguably the most visible of all misconceptions and inaccuracies about AI. We've all seen tasteless, cringy images like the one above: a shiny, usually white, humanoid robot in some cliché scenario supposedly representing our shared technological future.
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