Design a Feminist Chatbot

Discover the importance of feminism in generative ai

We live in an age of conversations powered by artificial intelligence. From customer service chatbots to bots that help you meditate, conversational interfaces are becoming part of our everyday lives.

Yet chatbots can easily reinforce harmful gender stereotypes or promote discriminatory behaviour if their designers aren’t careful.

On this four-week course, you’ll study feminism and its relationship to technology in order to help you build a feminist chatbot.

Explore gender bias and the problem of AI bias

By applying ideas from feminism to technology development, we can help people create products and services that promote equality and positive social change, rather than making social problems like inequality or prejudice worse.

You’ll explore the problem of bias and how it can be amplified in generative AI, such as chatbots. With this knowledge, you’ll start to unpack why AI bais matters and what kind of harm this can cause.

Learn how to apply feminist design principles

To help you explore how gender relates to technology, you’ll develop your understanding of feminism.

You’ll then gain an introduction to the feminist design tool to see a feminist chatbot design process in action. This practical exercise will help you understand how to design feminist chatbot conversations.

Gain prototyping and coding skills

Finally, you’ll learn basic coding skills to design and program a chatbot of your own. You’ll be guided step-by-step to learn how to prototype in code to create your chatbot prototype.

By the end of the course, you’ll know how to use feminist design tools to ensure you can design a chatbot that doesn’t reinforce bias.

This course is for anyone interested in the social implications of technology, specifically the ethical issues surrounding chatbot design.

People curious about coding would benefit from this course, as would academics in the feminist or tech communities.

You might also be interested in the other courses in the Essential Creative Technologies collection from UAL Creative Computing Institute, Lancaster University and the Institute of Coding.

We’ll be asking you to use some other online tools and platforms such as Glitch during the course.

• Chatbots and the problem of bias
• Getting started
• What can chatbots do?
• How do chatbots work?
• How chatbots become biased
• Why does AI bias matter?
• Wrapping up Week 1
• Applying feminist design principles
• Introduction to Week 2
• Introducing feminism
• Developing feminist design processes
• Understanding your stakeholders
• Wrapping up Week 2
• Designing chatbot conversations
• Introduction to Week 3
• How can conversation design be feminist?
• Visualising stakeholders' experiences
• Choosing what your chatbot will say
• Wrapping up Week 3
• Developing your prototyping skills
• Introduction to Week 4
• Using prototypes to test ideas
• Creating your chatbot prototype
• Wrapping up the course