<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/03/ai-sexism-violence-against-women-technology-new-era>
Online brothels, sex robots, simulated rape: AI is ushering in a new age
of violence against women | Laura Bates
Laura Bates
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment
in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been
described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which
dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most
valuable in the world
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/nvidia-shares-earnings-jensen-huang-microsoft-b2760051.html>.
The trend has been dubbed an “AI frenzy”, with the components described
by analysts as the “new gold or oil”.
Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to
stake their countries’ claim as global leaders in AI development.
Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the
wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February
2025
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/14/global-disunity-energy-concerns-and-the-shadow-of-musk-key-takeaways-from-the-paris-ai-summit>
and produced an international agreement pledging an “open”, “inclusive”
and “ethical” approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/11/us-uk-paris-ai-summit-artificial-intelligence-declaration>.
It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at
whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their
communications with the media, described the open-source release of the
large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “gold rush-type of
scenario
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/meta-openai-spawned-wave-ai-140000660.html>”.
He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI
bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month,
users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15,
described on the site as a “world without feminism”. Or they can “chat”
with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with
pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, “your clumsy older sister”
who is described as “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger
brother”.
This million-dollar money generator is just one of thousands of
applications of this new technology that are re-embedding misogyny deep
into the foundations of our future. On other sites men can
create,**share and weaponise fake intimate images**to**terrorise women
and girls. Sex robots
<https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/sex-robots-frigid-settings-rape-simulation-men-sexual-assault-a7847296.html>
are being developed at breakneck speed. Already, you can buy a
self-warming, self-lubricating or “sucking” model: some manufacturers
have dreamed up a “frigid” setting that would allow their users to
simulate rape. Millions of men are already using AI “companions
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20241008-the-troubling-future-of-ai-relationships>”
– virtual girlfriends, available and subservient 24/7, whose breast size
and personality they can customise and manipulate.
Meanwhile, generative AI, which has exploded in popularity
<https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openais-weekly-active-users-surpass-400-million-2025-02-20/>,
has been proven to regurgitate and amplify misogyny
<https://articles.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2024/07/PR_Generative_AI_UNESCO_study_reveals_alarming_evidence_of_regressive_gender_stereotypes_en.pdf>
and racism. This becomes significantly more of a concern when you
realise just how much online content will soon be created by this new tool.
Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely
the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new
future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your
mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same
way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the
patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with
a website called FaceMash
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/zuckerbergs-prank-website-facemash-ranked-attractiveness-of-classmates/2018/04/11/81a7dfa2-3daf-11e8-955b-7d2e19b79966_video.html>,
which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard
students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of
Facebook.)
Women, particularly women of colour, raised their voices in concern:
some of the earliest objections
<https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/>
to FaceMash came from Harvard’s Fuerza Latina and Association of Harvard
Black Women societies. They were ignored, Facebook was born and the rest
is history.
Social media was rolled out at great speed. Back then, Zuckerberg’s
famous catchphrase was “Move fast and break things”. The things that got
broken were societal cohesion, democracy
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/social-media-harm-facebook-meta-response/670975/>
and the mental health, in particular, of girls.
By the time people started pointing out that online abuse was endemic to
social platforms, those platforms were too well established and
profitable for their owners to be prepared to make sweeping changes.
Politicians seemed too enamoured with the powerful tech lobby to be
prepared to stand up to them.
The results have been devastating. Young women have taken their own
lives after experiencing sexualised cyberbullying
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/audrie-pott-rehtaeh-parsons-suicides-show-sexual-cyber-bulling-is-pervasive-and-getting-worse-expert-says/>.
An alarming number of female parliamentarians have stepped down from
office after experiencing intolerable levels of online abuse
<https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/31/alarm-over-number-female-mps-stepping-down-after-abuse>.
Millions of women have been subject to rape and death threats, doxing,
online stalking and racist and misogynistic abuse.
We failed to prevent this crisis when we didn’t heed the warning calls
in the early days of social media. We now risk squandering a similar
opportunity. Without urgent action, we will be doomed to repeat the same
mistakes with AI, only this time on a far larger scale. “One of the
reasons many of us do have concerns about the rollout of AI is because
over the past 40 years as a society we’ve basically given up on actually
regulating technology,” Peter Wang, co-founder of data science platform
Anaconda, recently told the Guardian
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/03/ai-danger-doomsday-chatgpt-robots-fears>.
“Social media was our first encounter with dumb AI and we utterly failed
that encounter.”
If women and marginalised communities have already learned from their
frequent mistreatment on social media to self-censor, to disguise their
real names and to mute their voices, these coping mechanisms and
restrictive norms will follow them when they step into new technological
environments. Nearly nine in ten women
<https://onlineviolencewomen.eiu.com/> polled in a 2020 Economist study
said they restricted their online activity in some way as a result of
cyber-harassment, hacking, online stalking and doxing. This helps to
explain the disparity between men’s and women’s use of AI;**71% of men
aged 18 to 24 say they use AI
<https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/women-generative-ai-workplace/>
weekly, while only 59% of women in the same age range do so. So long as
men remain the main users of AI, the technology will be designed to
cater to their preferences.
The answer isn’t to reject new technology, or ignore the enormous
potential of AI. Instead, we should ensure regulations and safeguards
are implemented when AI is designed, before products are rolled out to
the public, in much the same way that they are within other industries.
“I thought people should be aware,” said Leyla R Bravo,then president of
Fuerza Latina
<https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/>,
when she tried to raise the alarm at Harvard over the nascent FaceMash
website back in 2003. This time, might someone listen? It isn’t too late
for political leaders to stand up to big tech. The harms of this
technology aren’t rooted in a future dystopia where robots take over the
world. AI is already devastating the lives of women and girls, right
now. If people realised this, they might desire to do things differently.
