It’s official: AI hates women

What was great about being online for a long time was that, as a famous New Yorker cartoon once put it: on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog. Back in the 1990s and the early 2000s, there were websites and forums and blogs and hundreds of thousands of people who could be whoever they wanted.

It was, in some ways, a genuine meritocracy: it didn’t matter how handsome you were, or how charming you could be in person, or how quick on your feet you could be when in polite company.

All people cared about was: are you interesting enough? Funny enough? Pleasant enough to talk to, from one computer to another? Of course, there was trolling, and flame wars, and the gender politics weren’t always ideal. As a popular saying went at the time, the internet was a place “where the men are boys, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents”.

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Still, the sheer anonymity of it meant that like-minded people could choose to speak to one another and learn from each other, without having to worry about anything but the matter at hand.

The arrival of social media a few years later made things both worse and better for women and minorities. As people were gradually made to show their faces online – and even share their real names – some of the real world’s less charming dynamics began transporting themselves onto our screens.

Gamergate, which took place in the mid-2010s, ought to be seen as a turning point in that department. The vicious, relentless, targeted harassment of female gaming journalists and personalities showed that we had reached a crossroads, and women just couldn’t be expected to be treated as a class like any other online.

At the time, it was considered an unpleasant blip, but it was really a sign of things to come. A decade has now passed since then and the online harassment of women has only got worse. Coordinated death threats, rape threats and doxxing campaigns have ensured that being in the public eye as a woman now often comes at a very high cost. Would you like to be a journalist? Run for office? Campaign on an issue close to your heart? Then be ready for the internet to potentially ruin your life.

Naturally, things are only about to get worse. As a new report from UN Women has found, women in public life are now facing increasingly sophisticated online violence, mostly thanks to AI crashing into all our lives. Their study, which looked at the lives of 1,500 women in the public eye, showed that over one in ten had had images of themselves shared without their consent, including intimate or sexual content. Though the technology remains nascent, 6% had already been the victim of “deepfake” photos and videos.