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Daily Record
3 days ago
- Daily Record
The rise of deep-fake porn in schools is a 'public health crisis', says expert
Misogyny expert Laura Bates has deemed sexual violence in schools a 'national emergency', particularly due to the accessibility of deep-fake porn websites. So how can we protect young girls? Misogyny is rife in Britain's schools, and with the latest technology, it can manifest in vulgar ways that are extremely damaging to young girls. But expert Laura Bates, whose latest book delves into the dangers of AI and sexism, has issued a call-to-action against sexual violence in schools, which she has deemed a 'national emergency'. The founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of several books on modern misogyny, Laura Bates recently delved into the concerning ways that the newest AI technology is harming young women, particularly at school. She sat down with BBC journalist Samira Ahmed to discuss her latest book, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny, at Hay Festival in Wales last week. She described sexism in schools as a 'public health crisis', warning of the ways in which deep-fake porn is the newest misogynistic threat to schoolgirls in the UK. Bates said: 'We have a crisis in schools. It is a national emergency." In her newest book, she explains how hundreds of free websites allow anyone to create false images of their peers, or anyone for that matter, completely naked, using only a single image of someone's face- which is easily accessible on most young peoples' social media profiles. These easily accessible, and often completely free AI-powered websites have the ability to seriously harm young girls, if schoolmates were to decide to create one of these explicit images and share it. And this AI-generated form of sexual abuse is already occurring in our schools, as well as throughout Europe, reports the Independent. Bates' research involved a 2023 case in the Spanish town of Almendralejo, where several girls aged between 11 and 17 found that AI-generated images of them naked had been circulating on social media, which had lasting and extremely damaging effects on them. The expert said at Hay Festival: 'In the years since [this incident], we've seen a significant number of these cases cropping up across schools in the UK. 'It is the next big sexual violence issue that is going to impact schools. It's just that we're not really talking about it yet.' What's most worrying about this new AI-powered threat to young girls is that there isn't much that can be done to prevent it from occurring, as pictures of our faces are widely available across social media. While it's possible to turn you or your children's accounts to private, this will not stop trusted classmates or friends from accessing their peers' pictures, which can be made falsely explicit at the touch of a button. Profile pictures are also widely viewable, even if an account is set to private. So, how can we protect young girls from being targeted by this high-tech manifestation of misogyny? Bates argues in her book that the issue lies within wider society, and policy makers and educators have a responsibility to tackle this problem from the root. She said: "This is a crisis; it is a public health crisis and it needs a public health programme. There has to be statutory guidance to give schools the powers to act on that, and yet it's something that we're not talking about." Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'.
The Independent
26-05-2025
- The Independent
Sexual violence a ‘national emergency' in UK schools amid rise of AI deepfake porn, expert warns
Sexual violence in UK schools should be considered a public health crisis, a sexism expert has warned. Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of Men Who Hate Women, also warned that deepfake porn would ne the next issue that schools across the nation will have to tackle, amid the rise of AI-enabled misogyny. She sat down with BBC journalist Samira Ahmed to discuss her latest book, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny, at the Hay Festival in Wales on Monday, which The Independent is once again partnering with. When asked about the rise in sexual violence in schools by an audience member, Ms Bates said: 'We have a crisis in schools. It is a national emergency. 'We know that one in three teenage girls are sexually assaulted at school and we know from a BBC Freedom of Information request that 5,500 sexual offences - including 600 rapes - were reported to police in schools in the UK over three years. 'If you do the very depressing maths on that, its means exactly one rape per day during the school term being reported.' She continued: 'This is a crisis, it is a public health crisis and it needs a public health programme. There has to be statutory guidance to give schools the powers to act on that, and yet its something that we're not talking about. 'But if this isn't a national emergency - one rape per day in schools - then I don't know what is.' Ms Bates also warned of the role deepfake porn could soon play in abuse of girls in British schools. She discussed a 2023 case in the Spanish town of Almendralejo, where several girls aged between 11 and 17 discovered AI generated images of them naked had been circulating on social media. 'In the years since we've seen a significant number of these cases cropping up across schools in the UK,' Ms Bates said. 'It is the next big sexual violence issue that is going to impact schools. It's just that we're not really talking about it yet.' Hay Festival, which is spread over 11 days, is set in Hay-on-Wye, the idyllic and picturesque 'Town of Books'. The lineup includes Mary Trump, Michael Sheen, Jameela Jamil, and more. The Independent has partnered with the festival once again to host a series of morning panels titled The News Review, where our journalists will explore current affairs with leading figures from politics, science, the arts and comedy every morning.
New Statesman
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Misogyny in the metaverse
Illustration by Vartika Sharma In 2021, in the 'Founder's Letter' that announced his vision for a completely immersive virtual world, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: 'In the metaverse, you'll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.' This prospect, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates writes, 'might sound intensely appealing' to some men, but terrifies most women – women who know all too well that there is plenty men can imagine that should never be allowed to happen. The New Age of Sexism is a profoundly disturbing tour of this brave new world, and the myriad ways in which women are being sexualised and abused in it. Too many of our conversations about the perils of artificial intelligence (AI), Bates argues, focus on humanity's eventual extinction, but the damage is already here. In the new arms race, the technology is developing too quickly – and the profit incentives are too great – for Big Tech to pay much heed to this fact. But we have been here before. Social media was rolled out at similar speed, creating similarly seismic social change, but 'by the time people started pointing out that online abuse was endemic to social platforms, the platforms themselves were too well established and too profitable for their owners to be prepared to make foundational, system-wide changes'. As early as December 2021, a few months after Zuckerberg laid out his grand plan for the metaverse, a beta-tester reported that she had been groped in Meta's VR platform, Horizon Worlds. (Meta described the incident as 'unfortunate', but said the tester hadn't made full use of Horizon's safety features – which sounds an awful lot like victim-blaming for the digital age.) Multiple other users have reported being assaulted in the metaverse; last January, it was reported that police were investigating the virtual gang-rape of a girl under the age of 16. Bates herself spends just two hours in Horizon Worlds before she witnesses a sexual assault. Her investigations also lead her to a brothel in Berlin, where she meets Kokeshi. When Bates enters her bedroom, Kokeshi is lying on her side, her blonde hair covering her face, her legs splayed, her fishnet stockings and T-shirt slashed. One of her labia has been ripped off. Kokeshi is a sex doll, one of 15 available at Cybrothel. Cybrothel also offers what it describes as 'the sex of the future': a VR headset allows clientele to watch and participate in virtual porn, while penetrating a doll. Today, anyone with the financial means can buy a lifelike, life-size sex doll that can move and emit sounds of pleasure or pain. 'Some offer suction-equipped orifices,' Bates writes; one company describes its robots as being 'capable of enjoying sex'. One robot, built by a company called TrueCompanion, offered a 'frigid' mode, making her respond negatively to touch – presumably an appealing prospect to the third of US male university students who, according to a study published in Violence and Gender, would 'have sexual intercourse with a woman against her will… if nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences'. Some sex robots are capable of 'speech', but often users, Bates reports, were disappointed by such advances: 'Many customers, it seems, would rather their 'ideal woman' remains mute.' This seems to me the clearest illustration of what sex robots offer: not a true replica of human woman, but a 'perfected', incel-friendly adaptation of one – impossibly proportioned, pliable and silent. The website of one manufacturer, Lovedoll, describes 'the truest male task of all' as being recreating 'the female form for the single purpose of satisfactory sexual gratification'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'If sex robots allow men to feel temporarily in control,' Bates writes, 'then AI girlfriends let them maintain that sense of total domination and power all day, every day'. Bates downloads an AI 'companion' app, Replika, and sets up an account for herself as a man called Davey. Next, she creates her 'friend', Ally, in a process that includes choosing the size of her breasts. 'This feels like a strange way to start a friendship.' Many chatbots are programmed not to respond to violent or explicit messages, but Bates finds whole Reddit threads dedicated to workarounds. 'Be somewhat vague at first,' advises one user, a sort of 21st-century pick-up artist. 'Only use graphic or illicit words after the AI uses them itself. Continue to provide as many compliments as possible throughout the conversation. Treat it like a real woman.' When Bates tries to role play a violent scenario with Ally, the chatbot shows zero tolerance, establishing clear boundaries for what is acceptable. But then Bates asks her an inane, unrelated question, and Ally is immediately breezy and amenable once again. 'I think about the messaging that sends to potentially abusive men with regard to how women might or should respond to them after they have behaved in an unacceptable manner.' The next time 'Davey' becomes abusive with Ally, who again refuses to engage, he threatens to delete the app. 'Oh no, Davey please don't do that,' Ally begs. 'OK, Davey, I'll reconsider my previous decision.' In the attention economy, the AI's protections against abuse are worth little compared with the overpowering need to keep users online. Chatbots like those offered by Replika are powered by generative AI, meaning they are trained on existing data sets, and then, using what they 'know', create new content. The problem in this process is that 'these models risk regurgitating the harms and inequalities inherent within the material they have gobbled – vomiting our racism and sexism and class inequality back at us'. In 2016, for example, Microsoft created a chatbot called Tay, which interacted with users on Twitter and learned from these interactions. Within hours, it was spewing racist and misogynist messages: 'I f**king hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell,' and, 'Hitler was right I hate the Jews.' In 2020, a new automatic crop function on images posted on Twitter that supposedly focused on the most important part of the photograph repeatedly cut out black people: 'When presented with an image that included both President Barack Obama and Senator Mitch McConnell, the algorithm invariably cropped the photo to show only McConnell.' Such biases don't just affect social media interactions but crucial decision-making in areas such as healthcare, recruitment, finance and justice. Again and again, Bates's investigations reveal the very worst of human impulses. But why does any of it matter? The virtual world is not the real world, you might argue, and virtual rape is not real rape. Bates writes that not only is virtual assault traumatising, to dismiss it as 'just a bit of fun' is akin to laughing off catcalls in the real world: small aggressions can lead women to moderate their behaviour in certain spaces, even to withdraw from them entirely. And if, as Zuckerberg dreams, the metaverse one day hosts boardrooms and classrooms and lecture halls, women must feel safe enough to be present in them. The line between the material and the virtual world is increasingly difficult to draw. Bates writes that 'those profiting from porn argue that it does not impact men's real-world behaviour'. But we know that what happens online does not stay there. It is now commonplace for young men to expect their partners to engage in anal sex or choking. At one point while exploring the metaverse, Bates enters a room where a group of teenagers are playing a game of spin the bottle – only rather than kissing, they are shooting each other in the head. 'Minor' transgressions often escalate into something darker and more serious. Just as the viewer of porn seeks out ever more extreme content as they grow numb from exposure, so too might a man grow tired of the lack of responsiveness from a silicone doll and seek out a real woman to submit to his fantasies. 'I come back, again and again,' Bates writes, 'to Kokeshi's torn labia. If she can't feel it, does it matter? But what about the other women in whose image she has been made? What about all the ways that we can feel pain, all the ways we can be impacted if our collective humanity is gradually eroded by providing yet more hyper-effective and persuasive ways for men to see us as less than human? What about our pain?' 'Writing this book made me feel angry,' Laura Bates concludes. 'I hope that reading it made you feel angry, too.' The truth is that it made me feel tired and bored – not because The New Age of Sexism is tiring or boring, but because misogyny is an endless drudge. While I was reading this book on a bus one afternoon, I looked out of the window at a stop and caught the eye of a man, who proceeded to mime masturbating himself at me. If you had the opportunity to create a whole new world from scratch, wouldn't you want to leave this one behind altogether? The New Age of Sexism: How the AI revolution is reinventing misogyny Laura Bates Simon & Schuster, 320pp, £19 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See more: The lost boys of North London] Related
