‘The New Age of Sexism’ explores how misogyny is replicated in AI and emerging tech

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are already reshaping the world around us, but how are age-old inequalities showing up in this new digital frontier?

  In "The New Age of Sexism," author and feminist activist Laura Bates explores how — bias now being noted everywhere from ChatGPT to the Metaverse. That's the immersive virtual world launched by Meta back in 2021.

  She recently spoke with Amna Nawaz about her new book.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Laura Bates, welcome to the "News Hour." Thanks for being here.

  Laura Bates, Author, "The New Age of Sexism: How A.I. and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny": Thank you for having me.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So this is your eighth book, correct? You have spent years documenting, studying and writing about sexism and misogyny in all parts of our world.

  But there is an urgency to this book, because, to be clear, you're not talking about what could happen. You're talking about what's already happening. And you say that we're on an edge of a precipice. What does that mean?

• Laura Bates:

  Absolutely.

  I mean, our world is about to be transformed by A.I. and other emerging technologies in ways that I think it's hard for people to fully grasp, socially, culturally, economically, in terms of education, in terms of news media, in terms of the financial services industry, the criminal justice sector, you name it. It is about to be changed.

  And, right now, the foundations of those new forms, those new worlds are being built. What's happening is that we are seeing that emerging technologies and A.I. in particular are re-embedding existing problems, particularly structural inequalities like sexism and racism, into the foundations of that new world that we will all be living in.

  So, if we don't act now, if we don't talk about this now, it's going to be very difficult to unpick later on.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Just to kind of set the groundwork here, when you talk about the intersection of misogyny, sexism and these new technologies, how different are the experiences for men and women online and dealing with these tech?

• Laura Bates:

  I mean, they are so dramatic that it is almost like a different world.

  For example, we know that women are 17 times more likely to experience online abuse than men are. If we look at some of the forms of tech that are used to facilitate abuse, this is an overwhelmingly gendered problem. For example, deepfake technology, we know that 96 percent of all deepfakes created are non-consensual pornography, and we know that 99 percent of those are of women.

  In fact, most of these tools don't even work if you put in a picture of a man's body. And it has a huge impact on uptake. So, we're about to have a world transformed by A.I. But, already, if you look at the 16-to-24 age bracket, 71 percent of men in that age bracket say that they're already using A.I. weekly and only 59 percent of women.

  So there is a huge gap in terms of access to tools that's caused by that difference in experience.

• Amna Nawaz:

  The section on deepfake images and video really startled me, because you wrote about this division between men and women on there. You said that you discovered as you researched — quote — "I found thousands of deepfake videos depicting every female celebrity you can think of. I didn't see a single deepfake porn video of a male celebrity, not one."

• Laura Bates:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Why not?

• Laura Bates:

  Well, partly because the tools literally have not been built to create them, and partly because we know that this is a very old problem. Misogyny and violence against women and girls is so widespread. This is a new iteration of it.

  It impacts women to such a vast degree. For example, one in six congresswomen here in the U.S. have experienced this particular form of abuse. It is a huge problem for women, and it is very different for men.

• Amna Nawaz:

  And I want to point out too, this isn't something you're writing about hypothetically or something you're just studying. You have lived through this yourself.

• Laura Bates:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Tell us about that and the impact it had on you.

• Laura Bates:

  Some of the men who were angry about my previous book, "Men Who Hate Women," chose to take out that anger by sending me deepfake pornographic videos that they had created of me.

  These videos are highly realistic. It is somebody who has taken your likeness, your face exactly as it is, and a video that looks seamlessly as if it is your body, and then chosen to create hugely abusive pornographic material, which you then — not only watching it is like a gut punch, a huge shock, but you also know that that person may have shared it, may have spread it across the Internet, may have posted it on different Web sites, that other men, hundreds of other men may have downloaded it, may have kept it.

  It is something that is utterly violating and utterly beyond your control. And if it is so impactful for me, as somebody who is pretty seasoned in this space — sometimes, I will get 200 death threats on a bad day. I am used to this stuff.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Two hundred death threats?

• Laura Bates:

  On a bad day, you can get maybe 200 rape threats and death threats. So I already know about this stuff.

  so imagine the impact on a schoolgirl who is 11 years old, and this content is being created of her and being spread. Some of the girls that I write about in the book, they are 11 when this is happening. They are developing PTSD. They are dropping out of education.

  Or you are a politician being driven out of an important job, a public service role that you love by this visceral form of abuse.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Well, let me put to you what some of the folks in the tech industry would say in response to this, because you do quote who is now the former president of global affairs at Meta, Nick Clegg, who said it is kind of unfair to hold tech companies responsible for the behavior that people engage in on those platforms.

  And he wrote — you quote him in the book, as saying: "In the U.S. we wouldn't hold a bar manager responsible for real-time speech moderation in their bar, as if they should stand over your table, listen intently to your conversation, and silence you for things that they don't like."

  What would you say to that?

• Laura Bates:

  Well, the first thing I thought when I read that quote was that many bars are not safe spaces for women. You know, these are places where women experience abuse and harassment on a regular basis.

  But I also think we need to think about what it is that the Metaverse and other spaces like it want to become, because they don't just want to be social and recreational spaces like bars. They are pouring billions of dollars a year into creating a world where they hope that we will be attending virtual university lectures in lecture theaters in the Metaverse.

  They hope people will be doing business there, meeting in virtual boardrooms. And those spaces, I think we would hold to a higher standard in terms of safety. There is also a part of me that thinks, if you want to create an entire new world, don't you want to start out by setting the bar a little higher?

• Amna Nawaz:

  Are there policy prescriptions we should be looking at? Do you see the work being done to regulate this or to stop it from getting worse than it already is?

• Laura Bates:

  So it is regulation and policy that we need. And nobody is saying we shouldn't develop. This isn't about being anti-tech.

  But with any other industry, we would expect those commonsense guardrails at the point of rolled-out products to the public, right? We wouldn't expect big food conglomerates to say, well, some people will die of salmonella, there's not much we can do about that. We would accept that there should be safety regulations in place.

  With tech, we just don't tend to have that same approach. And so what we are seeing is that places like the European Commission are putting together frameworks of what commonsense safety protocols could look like for A.I., but we are also seeing enormous amounts of government pushback, not least here in the U.S., where President Trump recently signed an executive order really with the opposite aim in mind of, preventing DENI (ph) initiatives or policies from being enacted in tech firms and in A.I. products specifically.

• Amna Nawaz:

  The book is "The New Age of Sexism." The author is Laura Bates.

  Laura, thank you so much.

• Laura Bates:

  Thank you.

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