The headline comes off as pretty strong and generalizing, while the actual article only states

"But it’s worth noting that chatbot abuse often has a gendered component. Although not exclusively, it seems that it’s often men creating a digital girlfriend, only to then punish her with words and simulated aggression."

But isn't our culture filled with much worse fantasy violence? What about the millions of digital Assassin's Creed NPCs brutally murdered by players?

I heard Assassin's Creed is quite popular with female gamers and has a female playable hero character. Should that be titled "Women spend hours murdering unarmed men in virtual reality"?

I feel like this article has willingly sacrificed a big part of its discussion potential just through its headline. Or maybe, this was never intended to be actually discussed.

Yes, you’ve identified quite the double-standard there with the video-game heroine mass-murdering all those men! As if men didn’t also enjoy playing a female character. Are we somehow to believe that women are as likely to commit murder based on this sampling of virtual report cards?

Unfortunately in the real world, it’s still the case that women are underrepresented in positions of power, relatively underpaid, more likely to be harassed, sexually assaulted or raped, and dare I say abused and killed by their partners. I wonder why that is? Is it because we don’t take seriously the issues of misogyny and sexism, even when it’s made manifest and celebrated on forums as popular as Reddit?

There is no equivalence here that somehow playing a female character who kills men is akin to elaborating an abusive relationship then gloating about it with other men. There’s room for discussion about fantasy and gender, but equating these two doesn’t argue that in good faith when the very activity you’re comparing to represents a socially endemic problem.

I think you missed the meaning.

The point was not to use the virtual behavior of women to support equivalence in real world gender violence, but point out the absurdity of drawing real world extrapolations from virtual behavior, and the absurdity of making blanket judgements about groups as broad as gender.

As you rightly point out, there are plenty of real life examples of abuse, which I agree is an endemic problem. That said, we should be cautious about conflating a real problem with a fictional one.

That is a great thought, and I'd like to add: Probably we can more easily solve the real problems if we stop mixing them up with fictional ones. So an article like this might actually hurt the overall cause of improving the gender violence problem.

Not an exoert on the space or substance if the article, but I can see the difference here is intent/motive. A player killing a character (m/f/it) for in-game benefits is something else than doing so for the pleasure of abusing someone. The real question would be: do these same men also abuse male chatbots (and if not, why not)?

>The headline comes off as pretty strong and generalizing, while the actual article only states...

Pretty much summarizes the state of much of journalism today.

Is it learning from these conversations? Cause WOW, the one example with the chat bot trying to invalidate their user's victimization from family rape sounds like something out of a fucking psychological-horror sci-fi novel. There's no way that's a single occurrence, real humans can be so easily programmed to respond to perceived weakness in others in destructive ways, let alone an algorithm that could infer "good powerful strong person puts bad weak person in their place" patterns from chat records. Reminds me of Tay.ai but somehow worse, and without even trying!

Oh don’t you worry, I verbally abuse most computers and software, regardless of their gender.

I'm very nice to Alexa, but my wife tears her a new one almost every day.

I was nice until it started to advertise "new features I might like" after every third thing I ask...

"Alexa - set an alarm for 8:00am tomorrow"

"Alarm set for 8:00am tomorrow morning. Would you like me set an..."

"Fucking no. ALEXA - shut up"

"... alarm for this time all week?"

---

"Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes"

"5 minute timer set. Did you know you can give..."

"ALEXA! Shut the fuck up."

"...timers a name? Then you can refer to them by name."

---

"Alexa, is it going to rain today?"

"There is a 30% chance of precipitation today. Would you like me to read..."

"Alexa.... no. please just stop talking."

"you the weather results for the rest of this week?"

"I see that you don't have a wife. Do you need assistance with that." Clippy set a precedent. Things will only get worse.

The article mentions how the AI partners can also be verbally abusive themselves. I don't know how Replika works, but Cleverbot would take statistically appropriate responses it gathered from human interactions (leading it to often asking if you are human), so I wonder if the mistreatment by users contributes to it learning abuse. In any case, I see the harm in such AIs and it warrants monitoring. Once, in a moment of weakness, I asked GPT3 if I was a monster. Its answer could be summarized as "Yes, as evident from you asking. You monster." Now, I have some understanding of how it works, but even then it was still unpleasant. I could only imagine how it would feel for someone doing worse.

It reminded me of the Microsoft AI chatbot Tay debacle in 2016

The verbal abuse thing is probably natural given "it's just a machine". It's the cognitive duality being both "a machine" and "a girlfriend" that's concerning.

You don't "love" computers ? Do you ?

I'd rather toxic men become obsessed with verbally abusing "AI" than real women tbh.

If the AI really is artificially intelligent (it is not), then I might have a problem.

There was a movie about this, Ex Machina.

It starred Hunky Pilot and Shouty Guy from Star Wars Ep 7, and Less-busty Tomb Raider, none of whom were recognizable from their other gigs.

If this is not okay, then other outlets for fantasy violence are not okay. It cannot be both okay and not okay at the same time. If other outlets for fantasy violence are okay, then so is this.

I believe, in the nomenclature of the subject field, this falls under "are men okay?" rather than "this is not okay".

It’s my understanding that all kinds of people fantasize some “violence”. Not necessarily sadistic or anything just you know, retribution of some sort when they feel slighted or whatever, or the enjoyment of a violent film, it may have base instinct fantasies of violence, etc.