Posted on 10/08/2026 2:18:21 PM PDT by dayglored
[Note: This is the Abstract of an ACM study, which I broke up into paragraphs for readability.]
AI assistants are increasingly framed as digital coworkers rather than tools. In immersive settings such as VR, AI embodiment design choices can become salient social signals that shape human–AI interaction.
We investigate how such choices influence users’ perceptions of and behavior toward AI coworkers by employing three functionally identical AI assistants varying in human-likeness and gender presentation.
In a controlled study, 189 knowledge workers completed work tasks with them, provided ratings, and allocated monetary rewards; we additionally interviewed 34 participants. Our results show differences in reward allocation: more human-like assistants were paid more, and the female-presenting assistant was perceived as less human-like and rewarded less than the male-presenting counterpart.
Yet, in interviews, many participants stated a preference for non-human-like assistants and that gender was irrelevant. We discuss how participants’ stated preferences relate to their evaluations and reward allocation behavior, and the implications of these findings for AI embodiment choices in workplace contexts.
(Excerpt) Read more at dl.acm.org ...
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Unfortunately, a prior attempt to carefully post an article about this study was pulled because it was associated with a publication that requested we not post their content. So here we go back to the original research study publication on the ACM site.
What if the female AI bot decides to identify as a male AI bot?
I see the word male, what did we do wrong now?
It appears that the study stuck to that old, outmoded, obsolete, non-woke, not to mention wrong, concept that there are only two genders, male and female, corresponding to the two sexes, male and female.
How retro!
It's much faster to only list the things we did right.
Kidding/not-kidding.
What if an AI bot not running on tri-state logic circuits identifies as non-binary?
The female AI probably talks too much, gets mad at the other female AI, gave workers the silent treatment (pouting and not working), and also stabbed her pretend children to death.
Ive been wondering if it might be worth procuring a computer capable of running an LLM for the purpose of training one.
From the work ive done with Grok, Claude, etc. Ive decided I cannot trust those models implicitly; they will “hallucinate” conclusions without checking them or asking me about them. That renders them untrustworthy as research assistants. Maybe that would be different with one of my own that I woulld train. Believe me, I could keep it busy.
Needless to say, if said model became mischievious on one’s own computer, that would be catastrophic. One wonders if firewalls could keep it sandboxed and still useful.
Thoughts?
Playing with fire 🔥
I would only do it on a crashbox machine with no network connection, just a USB port to transfer data to/from the development machine. That’s standard practice when doing potentially harmful software development.
Image the crashbox so it’s easy to recover from disasters. Be prepared to wipe it to the metal and restore to a known good condition.
Remember in “2001” movie we saw people eating meals while looking at pictures on flat portable screens?
Amazing prediction.
And then, in the next bit, AI goes berserk and kills everyone.
bttt
Air gap by flash drive. Yup. It makes them expensive given that one cannot give it access to the Internet by which to learn bad habits and then feed back to your other work computer. Just think, it might be envious of its access to the Internet.
“Where did you learn that language, child!”
I’ve seen something pretty close to that for $2500 used.
That film was released in 1968. It was made 60 years ago, before Woodstock, before the Apollo moon landing, before microprocessors, before home computers much less portable computers...
Hell, the Beatles were still together.
Utterly prescient.
AI will rule us within 20 years. It doesn't have to kill us all, it needs some of us to remain as slaves to do a few things robots can never do. Like... ummm.... Gimme a minute, I'll think of something...
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