antiz’s Reviews > The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny > Status Update

In cases of school kid sexual abuse images, money is being spent on protecting the school’s image, not on e.g. educating the children about why it’s wrong etc.
“This sets a worrying tone for the inevitable cases that will follow: schools focus on reputational damage limitation first; victim welfare second.”

“It is clear that we cannot rely on legislation alone to tackle this problem. Public opinion and social attitudes are going to be crucial in turning the tide.”

E.g. some legislation suggestions have been to add an AI watermark. But this isn’t enough–even if ppl knew the pics were fake, women would still feel real impacts.
E.g. laws against political deepfakes but not sexual deepfakes. Obvs not good enough

White, western views of intimacy also fail to protect all women, of different races or cultures.
E.g. some cases in Iran and Pakistan, where depicting women without their hijab or with a man can result in her getting killed.

So many cases described of 12-14yr old schoolgirls having deepfakes created of them and shared by male classmates in many different countries. Yet none of the boys face action by their schools or police.
Teachers are largely unaware of the issue and are woefully underprepared for the rise in this form of sexual violence that is likely to occur.

“In a recent study, Genevieve Oh tracked the rise of deepfakes and found that 143,000 videos in forty popular websites were viewed 4.2 billion times. Just on of the most popular websites alone gets around 17 million different visitors a month.”

Set to increase too

The “owner of one of the biggest deepfake pornography websites told the BBC” that “consent [is not] required” because “it’s a fantasy, it’s not real.”, “it shouldn’t really matter because it’s basically fake.”
And “74 percent of deepfake pornography consumers say they don’t feel guilty about viewing the content.”
An “empathy gap”

Many people seem to think that “if the image isn’t real then the impact isn’t real”
But this is far from true. Having these images and videos created of you are deeply violating and disturbing. They can impact your livelihood, your personal and professional life.

Many female politicians are targeted by deepfakes. Yet the news does not focus on it at all. Websites containing these images have been visited over 12 million times in just 3 months. It can and has led to women stepping down from office. We could lose female voices in politics (which is already lacking) by the political and personal effects of deepfakes.

“For women and girls, the risks are very different, albeit less discussed in the public sphere, because society perceives the harassment and abuse of women and girls…to be far less of an existential threat than the risk of spreading political misinformation. After all, women and girls have experienced abuse since the beginning of time, right? What difference does a little more make?”

“96% of deepfakes are non-consensual pornography, of which 99% feature women”