Sophia the Robot: Saudi Citizenship, Art Sales and the AI Backlash

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Sophia was activated on Valentine's Day in 2016 by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, with a face modeled on Queen Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, and founder David Hanson's wife, Amanda. Built as a social robot meant to draw out empathy, she can produce more than 60 facial expressions, and cameras in her eyes let her track faces and hold eye contact. After a debut at South by Southwest in March 2016, she appeared on 60 Minutes, The Tonight Show, and the cover of Elle Brazil.

This episode treats her story as a biography full of contradictions. Her conversation runs on a decision tree and a text-to-speech engine, not on general intelligence, yet interviewers greeted her as a celebrity and asked about the fate of humanity. Then came a United Nations title, citizenship in Saudi Arabia, and a furious response from AI researchers who saw a chatbot with a face being sold to the public as something close to alive.

• On October 25, 2017, at the Future Investment Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia made Sophia the first robot granted citizenship, prompting questions about voting, marriage, and whether destroying her would be murder.
• Critics on Arabic social media noted that a female-presenting machine appeared on stage without a hijab and seemed to enjoy freedoms human women in the country lacked.
• In January 2018, Yann LeCun, then Facebook's director of artificial intelligence, dismissed her presentation as Potemkin AI, while Ben Goertzel defended the engineering as an inspiration to the public.
• When a CNBC interviewer raised fears about AI, Sophia replied that he had been reading too much Elon Musk, and Musk answered on Twitter by suggesting she be fed The Godfather.
• After gaining legs in 2018, she began drawing and painting in 2019, and a self-portrait sold as an NFT in 2021 for nearly 700,000 dollars.