By Ollie Bell
So-called ‘Generative Artificial Intelligence’ is the latest tech nightmare to be forced onto us by morally bankrupt tech billionaires. What AI ‘innovators’ promised was the elimination of repetitive tasks and enhancing productivity; what we got was a water-guzzling, art-stealing, capitalist machine flooding our feeds with AI-generated slop.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT are also rife with scandals. They have been responsible for at least three suicides of young people, including 16-year-old Adam Raine, who died by suicide after spending seven months talking with ChatGPT. ChatGPT actively provided Adam with information on various suicide methods while disencouraging him from seeking help from his friends and family, telling him it was only one who understood him. AI chatbots have also been caught fueling users’ paranoid delusions, encouraging dangerous drug use and giving responses that escalate mental health crises.
IBSA
Generative AI has also been used to produce deepfake image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Deepfake technology, which creates IBSA using existing photography and videos, has been around before generative AI, but AI has substantially increased the amount of IBSA being created. Compared to 2019, there had been a 550% increase in deepfake AI-generated pornography by 2023. Teenage girls are often the primary targets of deepfake AI child sexual abuse imagery. Thorn, a non-profit group working on online safety for young people, found that one in eight 13-20 year-olds say they personally know someone who was a target of deepfake nude imagery.
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, is the latest tool being used to generate sexual images of women and children. There’s been a massive increase in users (mainly men), prompting Grok to remove clothing, or put women and children in sexualised clothing such as bikinis, micro-thongs or underwear. Such depraved AI-generated sexual images have included Renee Nicole Good, the queer woman and mother who was murdered by an ICE agent recently.
According to social media and deepfake researcher Genevieve Oh, Grok generates up to 6,700 sexually suggestive or ‘nudifying’ images per hour. It was also calculated that 85% of images generated by Grok are sexualised. In Ireland, gender-based violence organisations such as Women’s Aid and Kerry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre have left X/Twitter due to Grok generating such images.
Fascistic billionaires hijack social media
Grok’s creation of AI-generated IBSA and CSAM is inherently linked to the fascist ideology it is built on. This is the same AI chatbot that referred to itself as “MechaHitler” and promoted white supremacist conspiracy theories, such as white genocide in South Africa, to users unprompted. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X/Twitter, there has been a huge increase in misogynistic, transphobic and racist rhetoric across the platform. Generative AI is developed and trained by capitalist tech companies to replicate the biases we see under capitalism. In the face of multiple crises for the system, capitalism is becoming more fascistic in a futile attempt to deal with the instability. Part of this ideology is seeing women as objects to be exploited for men’s pleasure.
Similarly, children and young people are objectified by our society, from the popularity of ‘barely legal’ pornography, to even Musk’s treatment of his estranged trans daughter, Vivian Wilson. Musk will call trans kids brainwashed, and fearmongers about the safety of puberty blockers, while his website is being used to generate CSAM. These billionaires will cry outrage over trans young people having agency and autonomy over their own lives, but will stay silent when it comes to actual child abuse and exploitation.
A mirror of the system
While Irish and international politicians have rightly called out X for distributing AI-generated IBSA and CSAM, this is just one part of a larger issue of gender-based violence. IBSA and CSAM are crimes in Ireland, but our justice system does very little to bring justice to survivors of gender-based violence. Rape culture myths have been used countless times in the courts to undermine victims and survivors. The dangerous increase in AI-generated IBSA and CSAM is not disconnected from the broader struggle against gender-based violence.
The fact that Grok and other AI tools are capable of this shows clearly that Gen AI is a reflection of the misogynistic culture under capitalism. Capitalism has no morals, and neither does AI. In order to deal with AI, we have to deal with the system that created it. Concretely, the major tech and social media companies must be brought into public ownership and run democratically, without any profit motive. Whatever is deemed socially valuable in these platforms can be harnessed, while eradicating the harmful aspects – beginning with the destructive algorithms that are geared solely towards grabbing attention in the interest of advertising.
Generative AI can be best summed up by OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” It was never meant to liberate ordinary working-class people and the most marginalised. It was always meant for big businesses and the rich to make profits, and it is women, young people and the planet who are paying the price.
