JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants more women to use AI, so she created an AI assistant that centered on women's experiences to help lighten the mental load of parenting as a working mom. But she also touched off a heated debate about the role artificial intelligence should have in parenting and gender expectations. And we wanted to talk directly with the person who sparked this discussion. Marissa Mayer joins us now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MARISSA MAYER: Thank you very much for having me.
SUMMERS: OK, let's just start at the beginning here because last week, the New York Times ran the super buzzy profile of you. It opened with a story where you used your AI assistant Dazzle to come up with a list of three bullet points about your daughter. And that anecdote just sparked a ton of backlash. It was all over my social media feeds last week. Were you surprised by the reaction?
MAYER: I was because I think there was some context that was missing, which is I shared that anecdote because it was from back when we were first building the product. I was testing the technology. And what happened was basically all my engineers were really excited. From our photos, we could tell their pet's name. From their photos, we could tell, you know, their mother's birth date. And I wondered what it could tell.
And I got this assignment from the school to prepare a slide for my twins birthday, and I put it in. And I have to say, I didn't have high hopes because most facial recognition can't tell my twins apart. They're identical. And then, much to my surprise, Dazzle came back and described them pretty perfectly and also pulled up examples from kindergarten projects they had done five years before where these traits were evident.
So it's just kind of a fun anecdote, not necessarily how people use the product. There's lots of different ways to use Dazzle, and we're delighted with however people do. But this is really more about the power of what's in our photos, and when you give that to an AI assistant, how that can help you.
SUMMERS: Why do you think women need their own tailored AI assistant or something that perhaps functions differently and more specially for us?
MAYER: Well, first of all, Dazzle isn't just for women. It's for everyone. So, you know, it's not necessarily tailored for that experience. I do think, because busy women have a lot on their plates, this is a great thing, where you can actually delegate some of what you have to do, be it buying, fixing things around the house, booking things, calendaring.
SUMMERS: But as I think about this, I wonder, instead of an AI tool to help us outsource emotional labor, those long to do lists that I think every woman in my life, including myself, has, why not an AI tool to help men pitch in? The implication is that, you know, women need to do more work. We're not really talking about the fact that, like, we carry this huge emotional load.
MAYER: Yeah, and I think that for the emotional piece, I will say that's one of the things where I think that's something that my example wasn't perfect for on the birthday slide...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MAYER: ...Because that's something that - you know, you want a deep connection with your child, and I have them with mine.
SUMMERS: Sure.
MAYER: And I think what you want to do is take some of the things that are less personal, less emotional and outsource those to AI. And as I said, it doesn't have to be just women.
SUMMERS: No.
MAYER: I just feel that at the current moment, from what we're seeing, women might need a little bit more of a nudge to use it and also ideas and examples for how to get the best out of it.
SUMMERS: I can't help thinking about the dynamic between emotional labor versus emotional connection. One might argue that labor is what gives our connections value. Do you worry at all that these types of tools could devalue the actual relationships we have?
MAYER: Well, again, I - here I wasn't outsourcing my relationship with my daughter.
SUMMERS: Sure.
MAYER: I was going to have to write the slide one way or the other. What I would outsource is, you know, being able to add all the, you know, calendar dates of, you know, an upcoming trivia night at school or, you know, a dance studio closure.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MAYER: So this is less about the emotional piece, which is where I think AI frees us up. What Dazzle is trying to do is give people the gift of time. Like, I think that with it you can decide how you want to use Dazzle, and you can also decide, with the time that you're given back, how to spend it. And I think it would be great. I know, for me, as a parent, I've used that time to have more quality time with my kids.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Thank you so much for joining us.
MAYER: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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