Is AI the Latest Battleground for Women’s Oppression?

After spending her early twenties working as a nanny in the UK, Laura Bates observed that the young girls in her care were increasingly fixated on their bodies, influenced by pervasive marketing. In 2012, Bates, a feminist author and activist based in London, founded The Everyday Sexism Project, a platform aimed at documenting and confronting sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence globally by spotlighting subtle yet harmful manifestations, such as invisible labor, referring to women as girls, and commenting on women’s attire in professional contexts. This initiative was transformed into a book in 2014.

Since then, women’s sexual harassment has extended into the digital realm, highlighted by Bates’ own experience with deepfake pornography, which led her to pen her latest book, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny, released on September 9 by Sourcebooks.

Though gender-based violence is predominantly committed by those close to the victim, the rapid, inexpensive access to artificial intelligence “is significantly lowering the threshold for this type of abuse,” Bates explains to WIRED. “Anyone, regardless of age, with internet access can now create highly realistic abusive, pornographic images of any woman or girl from a fully clothed image obtained online.”

Through firsthand research that included dialogues with tech developers and women who have encountered victimization from AI and deepfake technologies, along with utilizing the chatbots and sexbots she critiques, in The New Age of Sexism, Bates outlines how, without urgent and appropriate regulation, AI represents a new battleground for the oppression of women.

“I understand some might say ‘she sounds like a pearl-clutching, nagging, uptight feminist,’ but if you look at the leadership of major tech companies, men at those levels are expressing the same concerns,” Bates points out, referencing Jan Leike, who left OpenAI last year due to worries about prioritizing “shiny products” over safety. “This caution is being raised by individuals embedded at high levels within these companies. The key question is whether we are ready to heed their warnings.”

Bates also engages with WIRED about how AI girlfriends and virtual assistants can instill misogyny in children, the environmental impact of AI affecting women disproportionately, and how swiftly new technologies can devolve into the prejudices of their developers and users.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: One thing that struck me about your book is it never takes long for new developments to devolve into misogyny. Do you think that’s fair to say?

Laura Bates: It’s a longstanding, familiar pattern. We’ve witnessed this with the internet, social media, and online pornography. Almost invariably, when new technologies emerge and we have the privilege of access, a considerable portion will quickly become exploited to harass, abuse, and control women, reinforcing patriarchal structures. This occurs because technology itself isn’t inherently good or bad; it embodies the biases of its creators. It mirrors historical societal misogyny but revitalizes them, offering new means for targeting and new forms of abuse. What’s especially concerning about this latest technological frontier, particularly regarding AI and generative forms, is that it doesn’t merely reproduce existing abuses; it exacerbates them through more intensified threats, harassment, and control by abusers.