What AI means beyond your essay: Part One

When I think about what AI means to me, my mind goes first to Turnitin: possibly a response from my first year, where the fear of being accused of ‘cheating’ loomed larger than any exam or essay I’d previously tackled – or even the fear of cooking dinner without turning my accommodation’s kitchen into a disaster zone. Recently, when I searched Substack (an essay and article platform I discovered through TikTok), this institutional focus on ‘cheating’ remained central to the AI debate – how AI is ‘ruining’ institutions and impacting academia. Lately, when I have read the news or listened to the podcast The Rest Is Politics, the focus has been on whether AI will out-think humanity, or who will win the ‘race’ of AI development between China and the USA.

I knew we were on the cusp of AI transforming our world, but I did not realise that discriminatory historical prejudices could be rapidly reproduced and intensified as AI evolves

 My mind never wandered to the surge in AI deepfake pornography and digital violence in which 99% of victims are women. I did not know about deepfakes being produced of women in Iran without hijabs that could amount to their death sentence. I did not consider, at this very moment, there are ordinary girls like me whose futures flash before their eyes when they see AI-generated, realistic naked images of themselves circulating online. I did not dive deeper into any of this until I read Laura Bates’s new book: The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny. I knew we were on the cusp of AI transforming our world, but I did not realise that discriminatory historical prejudices could be rapidly reproduced and intensified as AI evolves.

Bates’s first chapter, ‘The New Age of Slut-Shaming – Deepfakes’, is the heart of the book. It dives into the explosion of deepfakes – AI-generated media that depicts someone doing or saying things they never did – that are now being proliferated to create non-consensual pornography, with such videos doubling every six months. Bates was driven to write this book after the men who opposed her previous work, Men Who Hate Women, retaliated with abusive pornographic deepfakes of her, showing how easily AI can be infused and weaponised with existing misogyny – ironically, they also proved the urgency of Bates arguments and the relevance of them.

Whilst we have all probably seen AI videos of Donald Trump circulating, Bates points out that much more exists of his daughter, Ivanka and his wife, Melania

She traces how deepfake pornography victims have shifted from celebrities like Taylor Swift to ordinary girls, noting that 63% of users now want to undress girls they know personally. Bates demonstrates just how easy this is: with a few clicks and for completely free, she was able to generate a naked photo of herself on a red carpet. The implications go far beyond individual cases. On a systematic level, Bates proves how schools in Spain and the US are ill-equipped to respond to this surge, prioritising reputation over girls’ individual welfare. At a political level, while we may remember the public outcry that occurred when a deepfake of Sadiq Khan went viral in 2023, depicting him disparaging Armistice Day, Bates argues the same, but more sexual acts against female politicians are met with “deafening silence”.  Bates suggests: “This is a form of abuse almost exclusively reserved for women in politics.” Whilst we have all probably seen AI videos of Donald Trump circulating, Bates points out that much more exists of his daughter, Ivanka and his wife, Melania.

Bates’s following chapters explore: ‘The Metaverse’, ‘Sex Robots’, and ‘Cyber Brothels’, where the dehumanisation of women and stimulated workplace harassment is actively encouraged.

 So, whilst we scroll through headlines about AI threatening our jobs, business, and even taking over our thinking, Bates’s book draws our attention to the quieter danger: the entrenched prejudices that are infiltrating something that is marketed as – and should be – progress. In my next issue, I will be looking at what this all means for us as university students and how we can respond rather than just consume it.