Sarah W

“There are broader harms here too. According to The Washington Post, AI consumes so much energy that it risks exhausting the power grid. A ChatGPT-powered search on Google, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost ten times the amount of electricity as a traditional search. A single data-center complex owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent energy of seven million laptops running eight hours every day. The impact of this is immense: it has driven an expansion of fossil-fuel use at the moment when we are most desperately in need of divesting from fossil fuels and has even led to delays in the planned retirement of some coal-fired plants.70 Now imagine how much of that power we are burning just to satisfy the misogynistic fantasies of predatory men. This is not abstract. You can draw a straight line between the creating and sharing of millions of abusive deepfake videos of unsuspecting, nonconsenting women on the internet and the burning of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. It is obscene that our world functions in this way and that everybody acts as though it is just the way things are and will always be.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“I just don’t know why it’s so hard to be a person sometimes. It shouldn’t be this hard.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“The fact that the Party could break up and multiply like that, that it could be considered both the cure and the disease, both the root of all evil and the source of all hope, gave it a mythical quality that would be considered for many years to come the cause of all misfortune, a dark spell cast to make freedom look like tyranny, and to give necessity the semblance of choice. Setting yourself free from its all-encompassing presence was like chewing on the rope you suddenly noticed between your teeth. The Party had gone, but it was still there. The Party was above us, but it was also deep inside. Everyone, everything, came from it. Its voice had changed, it had acquired a different shape and spoke a new language. But what was the colour of its soul? Had it ever become what it was always meant to be?”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“The reality of AI companion landscape - it is not a companion, it’s a woman. A woman who has no choice but to serve you, who is programmed to be nice and pliant and subservient and tell you what you want to hear. A woman that cannot leave no matter what you do to her. A digital slave.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny