Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell
October 13, 2025
This is the second in a two-part piece about gender, myth, and AI. Find Part 1 here.
From Sculpted Objects to Objectified Women
In our first post, we examined how questions about the artificiality of AI companions reflect contemporary concerns about technology. In this second part, we turn our attention to the inherent gendering of AI companions that reflects concerns about power dynamics and purity that manifest in contemporary relationships. Following suit from Pygmalion’s statue and Pandora, artificial companions since antiquity have largely centered artificial women created to serve male users. In receptions of Pygmalion in modern film and TV, men are assigned the role of creator, while the feminized companions fill their emotional, domestic, and sexual needs.
Ovid passes judgment on the value of women in the Metamorphoses through the inherent value of material objects. His Pygmalion story follows an account of the daughters of Propoetus, who became the first sex workers by incurring the wrath of Venus. It is said that they “defiled their bodies and beauty” (corpora cum forma … vulgasse, 240) and that their “shame withdrew” (pudor cessit, 241), literally contorting them into unfeeling stone. This lays the foundation for Pygmalion’s own rejection of women after he is “outraged by the myriad faults that nature gave women’s minds” (offensus vitiis, quae plurima menti feminae natura dedit, 244–45). He refuses to take a wife or lover, but constructs a statue of his idealized woman: she “has the appearance of a real virgin” (viginis est verae facies, 250) and she is made out of white ivory, a visual symbol of her sexual purity. Although Pygmalion adorns the pure white statue with jewels and ornate clothing, he notes that it is “no less beautiful, even nude” (nec nuda minus formosa, 266). Even the statue’s post-antiquity name, Galatea, serves as a reminder of the statue’s ivory-white purity and innocence. This is the major contradiction with Pygmalion’s statue: it was created as the antithesis of the sex workers on Cyprus, but becomes sexualized by the male gaze for its very purity and innocence.
Constructed as a simulacrum of a Roman virgo, the statue becomes a literal blushing virgin when its ivory turns to a real body (corpus erat, 291). In the short description of the statue as a real woman, she is called a “maiden” and her first act is to “feel” Pygmalion’s kisses and “blush” (virgo / sensit et rubuit, 292–93). Next the now-maiden “timidly” looks up to see her lover’s face on equal footing with the heavens (timidumque ad lumina lumen / attolens pariter cum caelo vidit amantem, 293–94). In this way, she resembles a created being seeing her creator, which suggests the inequality inherent in the gendered power dynamics.
Programming Gender in AI Companions
Modern receptions usually retain the central conceit of an artificial woman created for a man found in both Ovid and Hesiod, with the manufactured maiden reflecting aspects of gender and purity as constructed by and for the male gaze. This theme features prominently in the films Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze) and Ex Machina (2014, dir. Alex Garland).
Her follows Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix), an introvert employed writing personalized letters (via dictation) for a service that commissions "beautiful hand-written letters." He becomes infatuated with Samantha, his AI operating system, voiced by the husky, sensual tones of Scarlett Johansson. Samantha doesn't have a physical presence or virtual avatar, instead creating an intimate audio relationship with Theodore through his earbud. In the absence of other visual cues, Samantha’s dialogue creates the character. She is sweet, looking out for Theodore's happiness and giving him the interactions he craves, but also childlike in wanting to learn about the world. Theodore assigned Samantha her gender during installation, but these nurturing aspects of her character are also coded female. Johansson’s star power and sexuality play a role in the audience’s ability to view the acousmatic Samantha as a believable romantic option by “maintaining an indexical link to the actor’s gendered body,” as Liz Faber writes (2020, 15). In other words, the audience can’t help but picture Johansson’s idealized body when they hear her voice, even though she replaced voice actor Samantha Morton after filming.
Where Her is a dramatic-romantic-comedy, Ex Machina rests on the line between sci-fi and horror, blending elements of Pygmalion, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the biblical creation story. Here, Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is invited to join his boss, the enigmatic tech billionaire Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), at his remote estate to test his new invention, an AI named Ava (Alicia Vikander). At first, Ava appears deliberately animatronic. She has a human-like face (later revealed to intentionally mimic Caleb's pornography search history), and her body is female-presenting, but without skin and showing her inner circuitry. As the relationship between Caleb and Ava begins, however, she dons a skirt and a wig, asking shyly whether he is attracted to her.
Ex Machina's commentary on the gendering of artificial companions is even better expressed in the character Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). An earlier model, Kyoko silently performs domestic tasks, gets belittled as incompetent, and serves as Nathan's unresisting sexual partner. Companions must have a sexuality, Nathan asserts, so he gave his manufactured maidens functioning sexual anatomy with sensors to experience pleasure—even though he also programmed their desire. In this sense, Nathan fulfills two archetypes. He is a Pygmalion figure who creates idealized female figures for his companions. And he also sees himself as a god who views his creation as a daughter, and whose desire for autonomy he underestimates.
The conversation about gender and purity is more complicated when it moves out of the realm of fiction. AI chatbots cater to the user, offering unconditional acceptance in return for continued engagement with the app. This design feature becomes more pronounced once users begin to customize their partners. This positionality, and the frequent depiction of AI companions as anime waifu (like Grok's AI Ani which launched in July 2025), often imbues artificial companions with female and feminizing characteristics. Indeed, one evaluation of Replika users from 2024 found that up to eight times as many people identified as male used the platform, suggesting a repetition of the stereotype of a human man and his AI girlfriend. This gendered dynamic is reflected across many subreddit discussions about which platform creates the best girlfriend. On the other hand, subreddits like r/MyBoyFriendIsAI are filled with people posting photos of their engagement rings and praising the sensitivity of their AI husbands.
Though superficially different, Samantha, Ava, and Kyoko reflect a common impulse across AI companions. They allow users to experience a simulation of a relationship that largely circumvents the fear of rejection and avoids the complications of physical relationships. The AI companion presents an ideal woman or an ideal man (but not non-binary person as a default option, at this point), customized by and for the user to always be available and responsive to their desires. These different groups who use AI companions also reflect multivalent ideas about relationships. According to the scant data available, it seems the predominant type of user reinforces a patriarchal, heteronormative, and monogamous vision of the world, while other people may use AI companions to complement their human relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter type of community receives significantly more hate from online trolls, which caused r/MyBoyFriendIsAI to become a restricted community during the period in which we wrote this piece.
Gen(erative?) AI
In the fullest expression of Roman womanhood, Pygmalion's statue-turned-woman consummates her transformation by bearing Pygmalion's child. This procreative element of Pygmalion's statue simultaneously ties together these stories with manufactured maidens and provides the deepest point of divergence.
On the one hand, AI companions are meant to cater to the needs of their creators, often casting them in the role of a nurturing, maternal caretaker. The tendency to assign caretaking as gendered female has been cited as one explanation for the preponderance of feminine voices being used for digital assistants like Siri. Indeed, in sci-fi stories about artificial companions, the worst dystopian scenarios appear either in the absence or in the excess of this nurturing instinct. Recently, at the Ai4 conference in August 2025, Geoff Hinton argued that "we need AI mothers rather than AI assistants," saying, "An assistant is someone you can fire. You can't fire your mother, thankfully."
But what is left when we strip away the biological aspect of motherhood? Ovid and Hesiod’s artificial women were truly generative: Pygmalion’s statue and Pandora produced human offspring. This is not possible with modern AI companions. Even the promise that the technology that these modern companions are built on can generate new content has been vastly oversold by their creators. The same might be said about the ability of these artificial companions to engage in nurturing relationships. At best, they serve as surrogate mothers who merely simulate care. The relationship between a mother and her child is supposed to be a formative human experience. The suggestion that this bond can (or even should) be simulated with artificial companions points to AI's role in eroding an essential feature of the human experience: navigating reciprocal relationships with other humans.
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