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

“While so many people believe that we are gradually making linear progress towards gender equality, the reality is that a new, powerful and readily accessible tool to enable to widespread abuse and oppression of women and girls is already exploding under our noses. Within the next few years, a significant proportion of the women you know are likely to be affected.”

Online abuse against women has been a huge issue for some time.
Female politicians stepping down after extreme abuse.
A UK female MP, Jo Cox, was murdered by an extremist man and her death was celebrated online by some men.
Many women have killed themselves after sexual online abuse became too mcuh

The consequences of deepfakes are real.
Deep psychological impacts on women (also stemming into physical reactions like vomiting from seeing such horrific images of ‘yourself’ or loved ones).
And they also give “men a powerful delusion of ownership over the bodies of any women they choose” which bleeds into physical acts of violence and abuse against women and children.

“The main outcome of such ‘women’s safety’ recommendations is not a dramatic drop in the number of victims, but rather an increase in the number of victims who believe they themselves are to blame for what has happened and who will perhaps feel reluctant to seek support or report the abuse as a result.”

In 2023, the FBI released a PSA about the rise of deepfakes, along with 10 recommendations.
Every single recommendation was about precautions people (aka women, since they make up 99% of victims) can take
E.g. have private social media accounts
But the perpetrators are often people known to the victim.
And removing all photos from the public sphere is largely impossible.
And we shouldn’t have to anyway.

“If we really want to tackle this issue, at some point we are going to have to stop the victim-blaming, the ‘advice’, the judgement and shame, and instead put our focus where it should have been all along: on the perpetrators.”

“As with so many other forms of sexual violence, the public response – including that of law enforcement – often seems to focus on how women can avoid becoming victims of deep-fake pornography, rather than preventing people from creating and sharing it in the first place.”

AI uses so much electricity and fossil fuels.
“Now imagine how much of that power we are burning just to satisfy the misogynistic fantasies of predatory men.”

“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.”

“Repeatedly, women of colour are worst impacted by technology-facilitated gender-based violence. They have frequently been the ones sounding early alarms and pointing out patterns of abuse (…) well before [other demographics of people] propelled the issue into the headlines. (…) [yet they are heard and helped the least]”