#*grateful

I feel like there were a lot of genderless AIs in sf lit of the 70s or so like in the Culture series maybe? But it sure does seem like everyone has been gendering their robots for at least the last 30 years

Yeah, for all that it’s supposedly such a thing, it feels hard to think of many prominent AI characters who aren’t gendered.  (I’ve still never read the Culture series...)  But for real, Breq and Murderbot are the only ones I’m coming up with, and Breq comes from a culture where no one, humans included, have a gender anyway.

Is it the idea that if you’re treating an AI like a full-fledged person and not “just” a robot, gender comes part and parcel with personhood?  You’d think you’d see more pushback in recent years on that.

Is it because Data was played by Brent Spiner and was thus *obviously* a man and no one on TNG was allowed the imagination to be queer because it was 80s/90s tv and run by Rick Berman, and Data just set the template for AI personhood in sci-fi for the next three decades?

Is it because of Siri and Alexa?