this should radicalise you

On AI porn.

I don’t really know how to start this post. On Sunday a man on X used generative AI to make porn with my face. I wasn’t the only one. Before I blocked and reported him, I looked at his account. It was full of similar edits, hundreds of women’s photos edited with identical effects. They were so cartoonish as to be laughable, a pathetic fetishist’s back catalogue, were it not for the nonconsensual context. A couple of women with large followings called it out. Their posts received thousands of impressions. Most of these were supportive, others were mocking, or responded by generating further images. The next morning, the account was gone.

I suppose I should feel thankful that it wasn’t just me. That it wasn’t personal and that it wasn’t graphic. That it was dealt with quickly, likely because of those braver than me who immediately spoke out. I have seen women in my online circles undergo much worse, and in isolation.

I don’t feel thankful. It is far worse to realise that this is the world we live in now, a world where this is something men can do easily and en masse, to women existing peacefully on the internet. Where it is as easy as shooting off a request to Grok, and it will reply in seconds with an affirmative chirp and a picture of a stranger cross-eyed with her tongue out and ‘glue’ down her face.

I’ve been trying to write for a year or so now about how algorithmic filtering and AI are changing the way we relate to one another, making us more mercenary in our interactions, more unthinking and selfish. About how people online come to treat one another as means to an end, as mere digital avatars, NPCs floating through a first person shooter digital gamescape, rather than as living thinking breathing hurting individuals at the other end of the screen. About how the language we use in the online world — user, content creator, E-Girl, stan — sets up a relationship of extraction and exploitation, in which those we follow become fetish objects rather than real people. About how parasociality isn’t the whole story, because parasociality implies a level of genuine, active interest and (albeit misguided) care, and most of the people we encounter online simply do not care at all.

I’ve started and abandoned several essays on these topics. One was about the poet Richard Siken, who terminally-online teenagers seem to believe is some sort of mystic love oracle to be summoned to spout platitudes about suburban trauma and the innate violence of yearning. Another was about the early 2010s guessing game Akinator as a blueprint for Chat-GPT and the gamification of artificial intelligence. One was about prank videos and filming strangers in the street. I never finished any of them; none of them had a proper hook. I couldn’t prove the point I was trying to make, that context collapse and a snowballing use of AI is encouraging us to treat other people like non-player characters, or paper dolls to do with what you wish. I had a sense women would fare worst in this development, but I felt like I was over-reaching and overreacting. I didn’t want to conjure up a culture for the sake of critiquing it.

Here is the hook: I have never felt more like a paper doll than I have felt in the last 72 hours.

I have felt dirty, like a ghost, avoiding eye contact with friends in the street, convinced that everyone who sees me now sees that image. Even writing this I’m torn between the fear that I’m grossly overreacting and the sense that I am in some sense irrevocably sullied by an attack made entirely of pixels. How can men hate us like this, so much that they do not see us as human? I wrote in my diary, after messaging one of the other women who’d been targeted. I do not feel human right now. I feel like I am made of nothing. All this, because of someone who will never have to meet our eyes, who probably does not even know our names.

According to X, Grok is ‘an AI assistant with a twist of humor and a dash of rebellion’. It is named for a neologism coined in a 1961 science fiction novel and popular among tech nerds, meaning ‘to understand (something) intuitively or by empathy’, or ‘to establish a rapport’. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other AI entrepreneurs like this sort of language. It reinforces their certainty that they are the good guys in a cosmic epic, the plucky heroes with their quirky cyber sidekicks, accelerating the apocalypse just to shepherd us through. It makes good marketing, too, as it pays lip-service to the craving for meaningful connection and the communities their technologies are in the process of dismantling. I’m thinking here of an advert for Galaxy.ai that did the rounds on socials recently; a diminishing group of friends eventually replaced by the company’s logo, under the slogan ‘The evolution of my social circle…’. ‘Friends come and go, but Galaxy.ai has your back’, read the ad’s Facebook caption.

The man — I suppose he could have been a boy — who edited our photos saw AI in this way. Grok, for him, was closer to personhood than the women whose images he stole and mutilated. Once Grok had delivered him what he wanted, he responded with a celebratory gif. In my case, it was a My Little Pony applauding, another reminder of the way the internet has enabled men to sexualise even the most inoffensive and innocent of things.

But I knew this, of course, I grew up in an era of the internet when people declaimed ‘Rule 34’ as if it were genuinely codified law. I suppose I knew that one day it might apply to me. I was more struck that, like the thousands of people thanking Chat-GPT each day, despite the grotesque environmental cost, he felt Grok needed thanking, repeatedly, for the copy-paste command he had provided it with, in the replies to numerous women’s photos. It was like we didn’t exist. Like we were the ones made only of pixels and programming. I suppose he saw us as femoids, or foids, incel abbreviations for ‘Female Human Androids’, a term of gendered ‘objectification’ and ‘dehumanisation’ which perceives ‘its targets as interchangeable and instrumental’.¹ There was a grok here, in the sense of an ‘established rapport’, but it wasn’t between two human beings. It was between a person and an AI.

I have had more arguments about AI in the last year than I have fingers to count them on, even if those fingers were generated by a trigger-happy early version of DALL-E. I have put forward philosophical points about human nature and metaphysical points about the soul. I have claimed that AI is the devil. I have made economic arguments and pedagogical arguments and artistic arguments and environmental arguments. I have had serious conversations with students and teachers and fellow writers and people in the publishing industry. I have cited the 2008 film Wall-E so many times it has become a joke.

AI no longer feels like a joking matter to me, nor an abstract theoretical problem.² AI is not an issue women can afford to be neutral or removed about — not because it might accelerate the apocalypse, but because it has easily been coopted as yet another weapon in the arsenal of a violently patriarchal society. We know that technology takes on the values of those who create it, and that those values go on to infiltrate society at large.³ Feminists have long known that the gaze can be a form of tacit violence, a means of objectification and subjugation. To have your image violated for someone’s sexual pleasure is to make that latent violence manifest. Men can assume ownership just by looking through a screen. When I asked one of the other women involved how she felt, she said dehumanised, angry, violated. Perhaps AI was always intended this way; look at how X’s Elon Musk treats the women in his life, from his wife to his daughter to the women bearing his eugenicist army of children. Look at how he has rebranded a global social network to resemble a porn site.

I don’t want to have to argue about AI from a place of harm and vulnerability, but if I have to, so be it. I cannot ever justify the use of a technology which can enable this, and worse. And I believe more than ever that if you can justify it, then you are complicit. Technologies like AI are changing the way we relate to one another. They are exacerbating the worst parts of human nature and society. When social media becomes a first-person shooter game and personalised algorithms deliver your interests on a platter, anything goes. The nonconsensual use of generative AI to doctor women’s images is just the beginning. The end point of individualism is the belief that only you exist. Everyone else is just an NPC.

As AI becomes more humanlike, albeit in a meaningless, surface-level sense, and as people come to regard it as such, the reverse is also true. People come to see each other more like AI, approaching them with an eye to utility. We regard those we encounter online more like characters than people, one-dimensional and stereotypical. They exist to provide a service, whether they like it or not, be it a viral video turned contextless, circulating meme, a Shein knock-off based on a custom-made product, or a selfie distorted into pornography.

For women, already objectified for the mere fact of existing, this dehumanisation is doubled.⁴ I’m reminded of the series of manosphere morning routine videos which went viral a few months ago, in which self-styled alpha male Ashton Hall reveals how he spends the precious hours between 3 and 9 AM. If you haven’t seen the videos, the answer is drinking lots of posh bottled water, dunking his face in lots of posh bottled water, and randomly demanding $10,000 over the phone. Also, being waited on by a disembodied woman, who silently hands him his meals and skincare products a la just about any feminist dystopia you can think of. In Hall’s most recent video, he shatters a glass bottle (of, you guessed it, Saratoga water) and her hands reach out to clear up his debris. Comments on TikTok debate furiously about whether this is his girlfriend, personal assistant, or ‘servant’. Another influencer in Hall’s circle regularly includes clips of a faceless woman bowing to him, before preparing all his meals and tying up his shoelaces.

For these men, women are props, tools, means to an end (even if that end is just triggering the libs on TikTok). They aren’t entitled to individuality or to personhood. We never see their faces, only their bodies, clad in skintight gym wear, or their manicured hands. They are little more than an AI assistant, another tool in the service of masculine self-optimisation and individual gain. A Female Human Android. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man who edited my photo consumes this kind of content. In it, women are servants, are sex-slaves, but they are certainly not people deserving of respect.

Because who needs a lover, or a girlfriend, or even a favourite Only Fans star, someone you might possibly respect, when every woman in the world is available for your personal pornography? When instantly-accessible AI services exist to make them younger, or slimmer, or curvier, or give them the ahegao face or cum down their body? When one in eight teenagers know someone who has been the victim of deepfake pornography, and one in seventeen have been targeted themselves? When female celebrities like Scarlett Johansson can have their voices stolen to provide an AI service? I imagine the man who edited my photo saved it after, as well as the hundreds of other images he doctored with Grok. I imagine he is not the only man who has done so — every woman who posts a selfie checks the bookmarks, tolerates the sexual comments and the unsolicited DMs, the influx of followers from anonymous accounts. And yet we are just expected to put up with this. Don’t post yourself online, then, someone responded when I complained about the image. As if a selfie is an invitation to a violation. As if a short skirt or a caught eye or an accepted drink is an invitation to rape.

Women are useless now, incels brag, every time the latest AI chatbot proves it can flirt or bat its eyelids, as if that is something we should be afraid of. This is laughable. Women don’t need to fear being replaced by AI or robots in our capacity as sex-objects. Under patriarchy, men will never stop objectifying us. What we need to be aware of is the way it can worsen our existing subjugation, how it can transform us into sex-objects without our consent or even our knowledge, with as little as one click and some clever wording to avoid the censors. And I believe now more than ever that we must actively resist the rampant spread of these technologies. We must not utilise AI for our own purposes, whether to edit our own selfies, or generate avatars ‘in the style of’ a particular artist or trend. In doing so, we are buying into a system of violation, of our creativity, our intelligence, our jobs, and our bodies. Accepting AI tacitly enables a technology which can do real harm to individual women and to all of us, together, in our struggle to be seen not just as equal human beings but as human beings at all.

Boycott AI now. Call for abolition. Do not be complicit. Hold those who are accountable. This should radicalise you.

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1. According to a 2021 brief on incel culture by an American thinktank

2. If you do want some theorising, though, I enjoyed

Sam Jennings

’ most recent piece, particularly his response to the ‘printing press’ argument.

3. Which I wrote about in my last essay on technology and the body.

4. As it is for other marginalised groups; I’m thinking here about Legacy Russell’s work on Black Meme