Artificial Intelligence (AI) is generating pornography with the faces of women who never gave their consent and with non-existent women who fulfill detestable male desires, but are AIs the problem or did only patriarchy get a new tool?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a set of computer systems that can perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence to perform them. Instead of following a fixed set of programmed rules, AI systems use machine learning algorithms to “learn” from data and continuously improve their ability to perform specific tasks. In other words, they automate, grow and evolve on their own.
They grow like a plant but someone has to water it. So the function of filling in your database and programming them initially has to be done by someone. Those who program Artificial Intelligence are mostly white men. According to a 2021 report from the AI Now Institute, a research organization focused on AI ethics, women represent only 15% of AI researchers in the world.
Now, the problems: There is an AI that creates porn videos with the faces of celebrities and anyone else. And they are not just any disgrace, with it you can create pornographic images and videos that look realistic using techniques such as deep learning and the generation of neural networks. Consent, guarantees and even the perception of what is real and not are erased.
A Atric, a very famous streamer, had a terrible scandal in January when he was discovered watching explicit content made with artificial intelligence from other streamers. But it wasn't just any content: it was from her group of friends. QTCinderella and Sweet Anita, their affected friends, had to pay to get rid of that content that they didn't even know existed, and in tears they told how humiliated they felt.
As a classic guilty man, he said that supposedly “I was just curious”, that “I was on PornHub and an advertisement came out and it clicked”, but everyone knows that's a lie, that doesn't open up several of your friends' Deepfakes tabs.
In addition, it was a page that requires prior subscription, so I had to have paid and explicitly requested that content: the page makes AI-generated porn “on demand” with celebrities. According to Sensity AI, 96% of Deepfake porn videos are not consensual; that is, the person has NO IDEA that they exist.
This represents many more tricks and tools for violence and harassment than even without AI we live in, now imagine what that future will be like with the help of AIs in revenge porn, for example. In fact, in 2020, a Telegram with 50,000 subscribers in Russia created more than 100,000 abusive images of women, many of them minors. And yes, of women, because as we already know, women are the most affected by revenge porn, 75% according to the helpline for victims of revenge porn.
So there you have it: they can use your photos to create explicit content, to sell it or to take revenge on you, the problem increases because there is not even regulation in this regard, it is illegal to do what they do, but how do you control and monitor what is marketed on these pages? Problems of the future that should be addressed now. The worst thing is that it doesn't even end here since there doesn't necessarily have to be a woman behind these images, other pages create women from scratch, and that's a whole different conversation.
They have the ease of entering one of these AIs and putting together an explicit scene with a woman who meets the characteristics of the sexist dream: small waist, large breasts and childish faces. Just visit these Twitter accounts @fabricatedgirls and @TheRRRealist to check out the fantasies of virtual women who have created manes.
But not everything is horrible and the answer as feminists must be the rejection or reticence of new technologies. Project Una said: “The issue is not the technology itself. What's happening on the internet is a reflection of what's happening in the analog world, offline, and anything that is invented will be used to exert violence against women.” And the thing is that the problem is not AI per se, it is only the face of the heap of machismo that exists and when there are new technologies this is evident.
For example, researchers at MIT developed an artificial intelligence system that can detect subtle patterns of breast cancer 5 years before it develops. It works by identifying patterns that humans cannot see in breast tissues, making it possible to predict the possibilities of cancer development.
In fact, our dear cyberfeminists have defended AI. Chat GPT used to tell sexist jokes. Now he no longer jokes about women and answers that “it is important to promote gender equality and avoid stereotypes and discrimination”. So yes, we feminists can use AIs, in fact, they have already done so.
The Woman Stats Project collects information on the status of women around the world. This data simply did not exist before and thanks to it, it has been used by institutions such as the United Nations, the United States Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the World Bank.
Now these processes can be facilitated with Artificial Intelligence: bases that needed hundreds of people to create and organize, are just a click away, and that for those who organize themselves in remote places, alone and without support, is VERY important. Having women feeding the algorithm and making AIs lose their biases is also participating as women in new technologies.
Of course, with each new tool, the sexist will find a new way to be sexist: to access our bodies, to perpetuate what he believes they should be. But with each new tool, a new tool of feminist struggle is born, which we can and must also use.
