ChatGPT Is More Likely to Be Perceived as Male Than Female
This addresses the problem of gender bias in AI perceptions for users and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research about human-like attributions to chatbots.
The study investigated how people perceive ChatGPT's gender, finding across five studies (N=1,552) that participants were more likely to perceive it as male than female, but this perception reversed when feminine-coded abilities like emotional support were highlighted.
We investigate how people perceive ChatGPT, and, in particular, how they assign human-like attributes such as gender to the chatbot. Across five pre-registered studies (N = 1,552), we find that people are more likely to perceive ChatGPT to be male than female. Specifically, people perceive male gender identity (1) following demonstrations of ChatGPT's core abilities (e.g., providing information or summarizing text), (2) in the absence of such demonstrations, and (3) across different methods of eliciting perceived gender (using various scales and asking to name ChatGPT). Moreover, we find that this seemingly default perception of ChatGPT as male can reverse when ChatGPT's feminine-coded abilities are highlighted (e.g., providing emotional support for a user).