After the publication of Laura Bates best selling book Men Who Hate Women, which she said made a lot of “very misogynistic men very angry”, she became the subject of deepfake pornography.
Bates was sent deepfake pornographic images of herself which she described as “like a train slamming into you”.
“You can take a photograph of any woman or girl, fully clothed from the internet, from social media, and feed it into one of these [deepfake] tools, and within moments, often for free or very cheaply, you’ll have a dozen highly realistic pornographic images or even videos of them” says Laura Bates, author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.
Bates, who founded the Everyday Sexism project, says that most people are concerned about deepfakes as a political risk or a disrupter to democracy. However, according to Bates “96% of deep fakes are pornographic in nature” and that “99% of those feature women and girls”.
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While she acknowledges that these deepfakes can affect women in the public eye, the feminist writer says that these images are “absolutely rife in schools” with students creating images of their female peers or teachers.
“If that’s how it felt for me, then I would ask people to think about the girls I write about in the book who are aged 11 when this is happening to them”.
The deepfake industry is so entrenched in misogyny that some of these AI tools don’t work on men’s bodies: “Which goes to show what this is about” says Bates.
“The ultimate goal is to get women to shut up”.
Bates details the issues around policing deepfakes which she describes as a “massive blind spot”.
The author also details potential issues surrounding Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, an upcoming Meta project where participants can exist as avatars.
She chronicles how in less than two hours within the Metaverse she saw an avatar of a woman be sexually assaulted.
“People, when they hear the word Metaverse, if they know about it at all, they think it’s some future concept that Facebook is thinking about creating.
They don’t realize that it is here now. People are walking around in it now and women are being harassed and abused now".
The author also goes on to describe how new technologies are facilitating these new forms of harassment, including haptic technologies which enables users to experience physical sensations from virtual stimuli.
On the subject of sex robots, a $30 billion industry, Bates says that “they are being marketed as superior substitutes for real women”.
She also details her experience of going to a cyber brothel which she describes as “creepy”.
“I walked into a room where it looked like the corpse of a very young woman was lying on a bed in front of me” she says.
Bates’ newest book, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny details the reality of deepfakes and their effects on women, and how the age of tech has delivered an array of new instruments to abuse women and how sex robots are not a sci fi concept, but a commercially viable industry.
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