Virtual assistants, labor and care/data/surveillance. Configurations of AI in Feminist disputes

Abstract

This article aims to explore AI virtual assistants, which represent an automation of what has traditionally been considered feminized labor and are marketed as technologies for personal organization and interpersonal connection. Virtual assistants come to transform work both inside and outside the home, but they maintain gender stereotypes by presenting themselves as a servile, affectionate, and non-threatening technology. This also reveals gender, class, and race biases, as well as their extractivist logic of data and surveillance. While from feminist positions, virtual assistants are recognized as new allies of the home, as they make domestic and caregiving tasks visible and valuable through technologization, it is necessary from critical, sociotechnical and posthuman feminisms to question the logics of efficiency and autonomy, and to advocate for an understanding of care from a vital interdependence that involves both humans and artifacts.