A WOMAN has revealed her horror at having to change the name of an AI bot she uses at work because colleagues kept asking it on dates.
The revelation was made in a comment on Alison Green’s Ask A Manager blog.
1
The comment was in response to a query written by a reader about the correct treatment of bots in the workplace.
A reader wrote in with the problem: “Men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman’s name.”
They continued, “It has a female name (which was the default), and does not announce that it is a bot (though I don’t think it’s hard to tell).
“It gives a standard salutation and signs off with ‘Thank you, <bot name>.’
“All it does is schedule meetings, and it’s not nearly to the level of an AI chat bot or anything.”
Despite the bot just sending out generic scheduling emails, it has received some shocking responses.
According to the blog reader reaching out for help, several men have been responding to the bot and asking it out on dates.
The bot was sent date invitations from work emails as well as an out-of-hours personal email.
Most read in News Tech
It’s noted by the query writer that this behavior would be inappropriate if it were happening to a human.
This then raised the question of how robots should be treated at work.
The reader concluded, “Obviously the bot doesn’t have opinions about the issue, but if one of my employees was asking out women after a very basic scheduling email with absolutely no personal content, I’d probably want to know about it so I could address it, because it’s probably happening to real human assistants as well.”
Green responded with both amusement and shock.
She suggested changing the name of the bot to a male one.
This was echoed by another reader who replied in the comments.
Going by the name Miss Kitty, they wrote, “OMG I have to change my name to “Mark” when I submit IT support tickets or post to tech forums.
“It’s ridiculous that I can’t just be myself doing my own dang job.
“I’ve been having to do this since the early 2000s when I started my career, and I’m sad that 20 years later it’s still a thing I have to deal with.”
This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
