Guest column: The AI that women actually need is harder to build and less profitable to sell than Marrisa Mayer's "AI wife," argues former AI4ALL CEO Bo Young Lee.
In late October, The New York Times introduced readers to Dazzle, an AI assistant built by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, with an anecdote that was meant to charm and humanize.
When a teacher asked for three bullet points about what made her 10-year-old daughter special, Mayer turned to Dazzle. The app scanned her camera roll and reported back: empathetic, creative, an animal lover. Mayer called the answer “perfect.”
This personal narrative was Mayer’s attempt to show what an AI tool designed by and for women looks like. Rather than require complex coding or agent setup, Dazzle will learn about you using data scraped from your digital photo album, and spark a dialogue to assist you with daily, quotidian tasks. At one point, Mayer describes Dazzle as an “AI wife” meant to offload the mental labor that disproportionately falls on women.
But those comments put Mayer at the center of a social media storm, with women and parents asking questions such as: “What kinds of domestic labor should we outsource to AI?” and, “What do women really want or need from AI?”
As the mother of a 9-year-old, I had a visceral negative reaction to Mayer’s example. Of all the parenting chores I’d like to outsource, a task designed to make my child feel special and unique isn’t one of them.
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