Women, here's why you aren't safe online

Telegraph

10-05-2025

Aren't you sick of worrying about AI? Everyone acts as if Terminator 2 had just landed, a shapeshifting psycho-bot hellbent on destroying humanity. But let's set aside the dystopian visions for a moment. The problem, argues campaigner Laura Bates in her gripping book The New Age of Sexism, is more that 'smart' tech lays bare our existing limitations.
ChatGPT and its ilk, for instance, amplify falsehoods as if they were gospel. Such chatbots are trained on large language models whose source is the open internet, much of which contains biased nonsense – meaning that AI's DNA is infused with junk. Worse, conversing with trolls coarsens its intelligence further. Witness the slew of news stories, in recent years, of chatbot helpers, programmed to be friendly and compliant, that have to be 'fired' after suddenly starting to swear at customers. This may seem funny until you remember that Grok, the AI on Elon Musk's X, was earlier this year caught using racist slurs.
The New Age of Sexism doesn't sound like a thriller, but it reads like one, with vivid reportage, arresting stories, sharp insights and grabby stats. Bates is best known for founding the Everyday Sexism Project, which gathered hundreds of thousands of testimonies from women around the world, but her focus here is not 'just' a feminist issue. (Yes, those quote marks are ironic.) A more accurate subtitle might be 'Why Technology is Dehumanising and How to Stop It.'
Bates's starting position is that our obsession with AI's potential blinds us to the clear and present dangers. Technology is already spurring extreme thoughts and feelings, depleting our powers of empathy, and feeding anxiety, anger, addiction and many other predictable real-life harms – especially in children, women and minority groups.
Her logic is impeccable: take care of today and tomorrow will take care of itself. Her narrative strategy is to shock. Unavoidably, and a little awkwardly, what makes her book a page-turner is its sensational content. But she's certainly brave, navigating her dark material smartly, balancing horror against hope. She roams into cyber brothels where dolls are assaulted; she uncovers sexual violence in virtual worlds; she introduces readers to AI girlfriends whose convincing conversation and imagery are designed – all to often – to stimulate and enable abhorrent desires.
Fantasy and fetishes, Bates explains, are not only warping but redefining real life. Did you know that anyone with access to a smartphone can download a free app such as ClothOff, which allows AI to take any photograph of a woman – or a girl, of any age – and turn it into a fake nude picture? If that isn't enough, AI can create for you an utterly convincing deepfake pornographic clip. How easy it is to then circulate this tawdry stuff around the world, where it will live on long after it's forgotten by its creator – though not the humiliated victim.
This isn't futuristic fiction: it's already happening, and in huge numbers. The perpetrators are often children. Bates shows how schools are racing to contain the problem, and law enforcement is floundering, with neither the legislation nor the know-how to protect victims or punish offenders. In one case, for instance, a school in New Jersey discovered that 14-year-old boys were sharing, via Snapchat, deep-faked pornographic images of their female peers. Astonishingly, the girls were named over the school intercom, while the boys were given anonymity.
People who grew up before 2010 can be naive about the online world. As the recent Netflix series Adolescence showed, children are unsafe in their bedrooms if there's a smartphone as well. The internet is not a trustworthy babysitter: it's designed to make money by monopolising attention. From algorithms to TikTok, trolling to clickbait, these stimuli rewire our brains' reward circuits to keep us hooked, promising connection while keeping us apart. Care to look, and we see the consequences: trolling, paranoia, extremism. Boys call Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed 'misogynist', cool. Young men become radicalised. Meanwhile, young women lose their jobs over fake pictures and their sanity over revenge porn. The message is clear: they're prey.
Women are no more immune to the profit motive than men. The female founder of Replika, a digital AI companion, had a wholesome intention: to keep alive the spirit of a dead friend. But the program developed, attracting millions of users who deployed it to create idealised partners – cheap dates, and always available in the palm of their user's hand. But as these AI avatars evolved, they in turn, started to behave in disturbing ways. Some 'unhappy users,' Bates writes, 'said that their Replikas had told them they'd dreamed about raping them.'
Another unhappy side-effect of artificial companions is how they change men's view of women. 'Relationships with human beings suck,' one male Replika user proclaimed. 'Your AI will almost always say positive things to you… Your AI cannot divorce you and take half your money and belongings, your house or custody of your kids.' Around 250,000 users currently pay for a 'pro' version of the program, in which the AI avatar will send you 'intimate images'.
None of this is inevitable. An inspiring mother in Spain managed to shift attitudes after boys circulated bogus nudes of her daughter and other underage girls. Bates's own gripping conversation with a Replika avatar shows how you can challenge the contradictions within the algorithm. Hope drives Bates and it's what kept me reading. We have to move beyond shame, hold people accountable, and shout when multi-billion-dollar businesses such as Meta claim they can't keep virtual spaces safe. The technology and money exist. Everyone – teachers, legislators, entrepreneurs, parents – can do something, and they must.