A Gender-Nuanced View Of AI
Sunday, April 7th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
As a white dude who enjoys playing with tech, it will shock no one to discover that throughout the growing debate over large language models and AI toys/tools like ChatGPT, it entirely eluded me that there might be a gendered nuance to the various reactions and backlashes. Here’s Andrea Grimes educating dudes like me:
An AI-synthesized answer to an even lightly complicated question is to me both useless and terrifying as a woman. I’m already capable of synthesizing my own information because I’m accustomed to sifting through biased data, identifying and excluding unreliable sources, and drawing my own conclusions. Not because I’m a journalist, or because I have a couple of degrees, or because I’m just curious by nature. It’s because I’m a woman. Biggity bam. Asked and answered. I’m always already aware that the information available to me in the world is more likely than not to have been gathered, created, or presented with men, and/or men’s perceived needs, in mind. (See: the entire field of medical research.) I don’t need a robot built by a bunch of tech bros to use its tech bro brain to sift through information deemed relevant by and for tech bros to report back to me on literally anything. I already have that! It’s called the internet, and the tech bros use it to call me fat.
And more:
The AI zeitgeist is rooted in white men being so worried that they are on the verge of having to trust the expertise of people who aren’t just like them that they would rather get their information from a wrong robot.
Just when I thought Grimes had been as provocative as she was gonna be, her subject turned to porn:
Indeed, some men (or men of a type? Hopefully not in general? IDK! This one’s on y’all dudes!) are so excited about the erasive and invisibilizing possibilities of AI that they would rather have their pornography feature AI-generated women than actual human people. Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick offers a fascinating/revolting and nevertheless on point take:
So I suppose the idea here is to replace human sex workers with A.I.-generated content because these men want to look at sexual content, but they hate the women that make it. They want the machines to free them from the self-loathing of being a “simp”.
And the fact that A.I. porn crushing the human porn industry is compared to journalism is also telling. Because I think for a lot of men, particularly in Gen Z, all of mass media, including pornography, has been successfully coded in their minds as woke and feminine by various far-right reactionaries. And these men are now beginning to see emerging A.I. tools as a way to hurt, and maybe finally vanquish, those who make the human-created media that they seem to hate so much.
I have my own reasons for being interested in AI-generated porn that don’t match the speculations above at all, but I’m super mindful that I’m not all men, to borrow a phrase with my tongue firmly in cheek. Moreover I’m forced to agree that there are signs of misogyny to be found in the community of men who are tinkering with AI porn. I don’t have a link at my fingertips, but I’ve seen porn webmasters in private forums whose excitement over AI porn generation definitely includes, at least in subtext, a powerful whiff of “at last, I can be a pornographer without having to deal with all those whiney-bitch models.”
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