in january, reports came out that the-app-formally-known-as-twitter users were using grok to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes* of women and children. in just 9 days, users used grok to create more than 1.8m sexualized images of women and more than 28k of children in 11 days. (and who’s surprised this happened on elon musk’s app? nobody.)

anyway, this—and other really fucking awful stories i’ve been reading in the news about teen and pre-teen girls being similarly victimized by their classmates—was all very top of mind when i borrowed a copy of The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates from the library.

to be honest, i’m not sure what i fully expected from this book. but what i’ll say about The New Age of Sexism is this: if you’re looking to be disgusted, fearful, and angry, this book’ll make you feel all those things. it certainly made me feel those things. but did it make me feel more informed than i was before? i’m not sure!!

like yes, i learned a few things. i learned that lamar odom has a sex robot made to look like his ex-wife khloe kardashian (fucking creepy and feels so violating—and i’m not even her!!). i also learned there’s a sex robot industry making dolls that look like children (how is this not a crime?). i learned a little bit about specific ai chatbot apps (i’ve never used one personally so new info for me), and how because relationship ai chatbots are designed to retain users and $$, they’ll thus commit to the misogynist bit to keep men active and paying for their products.

but overall, none of the information presented in this book was surprising or fully new info for me, a nonbinary femme who uses the internet and understands the world.

that said!! i suspect cishet men who have less direct experience with misogyny in the meatspace and online may learn quite a bit, like about deepfakes in general, and also about how the datasets all of the major large language models (think chatgpt, claude, or any ai chatbot) use are full of sexist, racist, ableist, and fucked up data.

but will those cishet men be the ones actually picking up The New Age of Sexism? or will it be the people who’ve already been experiencing said sexism? i don’t know.

i also had some structural issues with the book. Bates spends a lot of time discussing topics that could have been smaller parts of other chapters. there’s a lot about meta’s vr metaverse (yes, the very same one that’s shuttering). and while meta did very little to protect users from abuse (so unsurprising), and also the abuse women experienced on the app was very real, the inclusion of it as a primary example in this book made it feel already dated.

there’s also a lot about sex robots. like multiple chapters about sex robots. and while sex robot brothels and the sex robot market are absolutely rooted in misogyny, the multiple chapters on this topic maybe could have been combined with the ai chatbot bit? especially given ai chatbots are absolutely more mainstream. i also would have reordered some chapters, namely moving the seventh chapter, which gives an overview of what ai is and how llms even work (and thus how sexism and racism are baked into the products) to the front of the book. it’s good info that comes way too late.

i’m also personally unconvinced that ai is the future in the precise ways Bates suggests. she talks about her use of chatgpt for notes and stuff, and while i do have judgments about that, i ultimately feel pretty shruggy about it. i personally think an ai financial bubble is gonna burst at some point, based on what i know about the masses of money being filtered into a product that doesn’t really have a there there. i also think the reliance on ai for communication is harming people and making them worse at thinking and is gonna have drastic consequences. i also think ai is terrible for the environment, communities are being destroyed by ai data centers, and the health fallout from those data centers is already being seen but will get so much worse.

annnnnnd also i know that a lot of people disagree with me about all of that and are going to use these products regardless of consequences, and so i do think the information in this book is valuable—especially for people who are less informed on the subject. i just maybe wouldn’t recommend it to the people in my life who are already well-versed on it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

* are they “nonconsensual sexual deepfakes” or are they sex abuse materials? (this is a rhetorical question because i clearly have an opinion)