The new misogyny

An empathetic exploration of how cutting-edge technology is being used for the patriarchal project

- UTTARAN DAS GUPTA

The use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems continues to grow exponentially around the world, attracting huge amounts of government and private funding. According to German data website Statista, the AI market size was projected to grow to $244 billion this year and touch $1 trillion by 2031. Last year, California-headquartered AI company Nvidia beat Microsoft and Apple to become the largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.85 trillion. At the same time, experts continue to grapple with the fallout of AI adoption in our professional and personal lives, with widespread job losses, environmental impact and amplification of biases such as sexism, racism and homophobia.

In mid-2024, the Unesco published a report that showed how large language model (LLM) AI systems such as ChatGPT or Llama 2 consistently produced content with gender bias, homophobia and racial stereotyping. Trained on vast amounts of text data, the LLMs reproduce structural biases inherent in such texts. British feminist Laura Bates's new book makes an intervention in the study of sexism amplified by AI. "Despite the advances that have been made in gender equality, the world that women live in is still very different from the one men inhabit," writes Bates in the introduction to her book. "Men and women can walk down exactly the same street and have vastly different experiences. The same is true of the online world... women simply have a different experience of technology than men do."