AI-Driven Personal Virtual Assistants and Digital Alienation: Ownership, Ideology, and Subject Formation in Platform Capitalism

Abstract

The article provides a framework through which one can interpret personal assistants powered by AI technology as ideological “interfaces” within platform capitalism. Rather than seeing these tools simply as tools of convenience, this article looks at how their corporate backgrounds, ownership structures, and platform ecosystems contribute to the way we come to view concepts such as assistance, personalization, closeness, neutrality, and trust. By making use of Marx’s theory of alienation and Saussurean and Barthesian structural semiotics, we argue that it is important to see ownership, not just as an economic relationship but also as a system of meaning through which corporations gain legitimacy. We focus on four personal assistants, Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Bixby, fully integrated with their corresponding corporate platforms: Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. The article does not provide an empirical analysis of users of personal assistants but instead presents a theoretical interpretation of how these tools facilitate the development of individual identity, the extraction of data, and the process of digital alienation in contemporary capitalist economies. Through demonstrating how assistive language and personalized experience obfuscate both ownership relations and the capitalistic infrastructure underpinning daily digital interactions, we add to existing discussions concerned with critical issues surrounding AI, communication, and ideology.