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men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman's name :marseymoidmoment:

https://www.askamanager.org/2024/01/men-are-hitting-on-my-scheduling-bot-because-it-has-a-womans-name.html

I have sort of a strange situation. I provide consulting services for (mostly) small business owners. This generally involves scheduling some meetings, and I have an email “Personal Assistant” bot that does this for me. It has a female name (which was the default), and does not announce that it is a bot (though I don't think it's hard to tell). It gives a standard salutation and signs off with “Thank you, <bot name="">.” All it does is schedule meetings, and it's not nearly to the level of an AI chat bot or anything. Any parts of an email that it receives that don't seem related to scheduling just get ignored by the program. The emails show up in my inbox and I review them to make sure everything got added to my calendar correctly.</bot>

However, this complete lack of personal-type interaction has not stopped several of the men (not usually the actual owners of the client businesses) it is scheduling appointments with from asking it out on dates. Sometimes this happens within the same emails that were used to schedule meetings, and once a man sent an after-hours email from his personal address (which is somehow both creepier and also better work/life boundaries? I don't know!). So far I have just ignored these incidents and gone on with the professional relationship like nothing happened.

Obviously, this would be inappropriate behavior if it was happening to an actual human assistant, and I would deal with it. However, since it's happening to a bot, what am I supposed to do? Obviously the bot doesn't have opinions about the issue, but if one of my employees was asking out women after a very basic scheduling email with absolutely no personal content, I'd probably want to know about it so I could address it, because it's probably happening to real human assistants as well. What are your thoughts?

even scheduling bots reject my advances :marseyitsover:

orange site: "this is a good thing actually" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38922518

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