Online brothels, sex robots, simulated rape: AI is ushering in a new age of violence against women
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. 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 and produced an international agreement pledging an 'open', 'inclusive' and 'ethical' approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it.
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'. 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 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' – 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, has been proven to regurgitate and amplify misogyny 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, 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 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 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. An alarming number of female parliamentarians have stepped down from office after experiencing intolerable levels of online 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. '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 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 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, 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.
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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