As AI becomes increasingly embedded in every aspect of our lives, it's time to recognize the crucial role women play in not just participating in but leading the charge in shaping the future of this transformative technology.

Did this intro catch your eye? Did it convince you that women are currently playing an equal role in shaping the ever-emergent integration of AI technology into our everyday interactions with the digital space?

Artificial Intelligence technologies like ChatGPT certainly can be helpful but they can also deceive your very eyes. These technologies have the power to produce something that seems entirely coaxed in truth when in fact the reality lies entirely elsewhere.

Although being fooled by technology only happens to older, out of touch generations, right? Think your too clever to fall for AI’s tricks? Ive got some bad news for you reader… the intro to this very piece was written by …. CHAT GPT!

Although this use of AI was merely to trick your senses into believing a human wrote the introduction to this post, the use of Artificial Intelligence has far more sinister consequences. One of the most threatening uses is the image manipulation technology being used to destroy women's autonomy in the digital age: Deepfake Pornography.

Deepfakes use predictive algorithms to learn what one person would look like doing something else by studying images of that person and transcribing them into the situation the user wants to see them in. This technology can be used for pure entertainment, like this eerily realistic deepfake of Tom Holland and Robert Downey Junior as an alternative casting for Back to the Future. As charming as content like this is, the reality is that deepfakes are more often than not used to target women's ability to simply just exist in any digital landscape.

Thinking of posting that selfie to show of your new haircut? Well, in this artificial age, an act as simple as posting your image online can lead to the manipulation of your likeness and body into non-consensual sexual scenes. Deepfake Pornography is an emergent use of AI technology, that through predictive algorithms, simply put, imagines what a clothed person would look like unclothed.

This act of defamation isn’t just an outrageous violation of privacy but actually reproduces countless systems of gendered violence, inequality and power structures that define our lived realities and histories as women.

With over 96 % of deepfake content being sexually explicit in nature, and 99% of those depicted being women and young girls, deepfake technology has become yet another tool for gender based violence. A space where men can manipulate our image to fuel their desire for control. This act of revenge has showed clear evidence that digital gender based violence hasn’t just affected women's lives in the technological world but that deepfake pornography has a deep effect on women's existence in our social world. WAKE UP people ! This isn’t just about embarrassing digital footprints anymore…

In a documentary titled Another Body, a 22-year-old college student tells the harrowing story of  the deepfake pornography a once close male friend made of not just her but several of her other engineering female classmates. After calling the police, she was told that “ they didn’t break any laws, so they had the right to do that”.

AI technology and deepfake pornography are reproducing the very structures that silence victims of sexual assault, abuse and non-consensual explicit image sharing. Victims like those college girls are being told that there’s nothing that can be done to stop their body from being violated, even if all they did was exist in the digital world.

So why is this all happening and more importantly why do women seem to be yet again the target for this virtual sexual defamation?

The reality is that most AI systems, the very technologies that determine the predictive algorithms used for deepfakes, are trained on images from the internet riddled with misrepresentations or exaggerations of gender stereotypes. And to make matters even worse, the human actors involved in building systems of artificial intelligence are mostly men.

Yet another male dominated workforce whose lack of female employment is making women's lives difficult. History really does have a funny way of repeating itself.

 More women in AI means less bias built into data algorithms, producing technologies that aren’t inherently sexist merely because they are trained on data that represents nuanced perspectives on gender. In order to build systems that don’t discriminate on the case of gender, we need to include ALL genders in the forces building those systems.

Harnessing AI to harass and humiliate women by stripping them of their sexual autonomy is  being coined as Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV). The acronym encompasses any act of violence amplified or assisted by the use of information and communication technologies on the basis of gender.

Deepfake pornography, from the lack of women in the AI workforce to the algorithms themselves being tested on biased data is as its core a feminist issue. Reproducing acts of gendered violence and revenge fantasies, this technology is deeply dangerous to the future of women's autonomy to exist in online spaces.

But all is not lost! There are countless initiatives and movements being started to address these biases. Take the UNFPA Campaign Body Right, which aims to keep women safe online by giving them the autonomy to copyright their own bodies. The campaign provides internet users with a copyright logo to place on their images to protect artificial intelligence algorithms from manipulating their likeness into non-consensual images.

Together we can rise up against the systems these technologies reproduce, fighting back against deepfake pornography by raising our awareness of what goes into building these technologies and the gender biases they reproduce.