Opinion
What happens if a sexbot is your first intimate encounter? Nothing good
Jacqueline Maley
Columnist and senior journalistKim Kardashian’s appearance on the Met Gala red carpet this week – having hoicked herself into a corset so tiny she struggled to breathe, and walk – is probably not what the suffragettes fought for.
They knew what it was like to wear one – the Victorian ideal was an 18-inch waist. Tired of being unable to move without male help, and desirous of the independence afforded by bicycle-riding, they led the movement to ditch corsetry.
Kim Kardashian struggled to breathe, and walk at the Met Gala, so tight was her corsetry. “Her physical appearance now matches the distortions of her digitally massaged, cartoonish online appearance.”Credit: Getty
A century or so later, it’s hard not to see Kardashian – the world’s greatest online influencer, the patient zero of the internet – ushering in a retrograde era. With her wasp-waist, she presents as a sort of inverse eating disorder. Her physical appearance now matches the distortions of her digitally massaged, cartoonish online appearance. And as she shrinks physically, her online profile further enlarges.
Kardashian has long flogged “waist trainers” and has her own line of Spanx, and what better platform for them? The online female consumer is her quarry.
According to a new book on gender inequality online, girls are groomed by influencers such as Kardashian to be digital consumers, which sets them up for passivity in the online universe.
It is widely acknowledged that technology is driving political polarisation.
But according to Carla Wilshire, the author of Time to Reboot: Feminism in the Algorithm Age, this digital-led polarisation is also happening along gender lines.
“I am concerned that we have technology that is training girls to have a very different economic relationship to the digital economy than boys,” says Wilshire. “Girls are significantly more likely to follow a brand online, significantly more likely to take photos of themselves in new clothing, and elicit likes from social media.
Girls are more likely to look at social media online which is directly correlated with their increasing anxiety levels.Credit: Istock
“Boys are more likely to invest in cryptocurrency and brag about gaming.”
Wilshire is the CEO of the not-for-profit Social Policy Group. She became interested in the digital gender divide when conducting focus groups on technology use with young people aged 16 to 20.
“Young boys and young girls were very, very different,” she tells me. “Boys were talking about gaming, and [misogynistic influencer] Andrew Tate came up a lot. They were generally feeling empowered in their online experiences. They were confident talking about it.”
Among young girls, however, Wilshire found “there was heightened anxiety and a sense that online was not a safe space for them”.
In her book, Wilshire argues that “the digital realm is outflanking feminism, edging it into retreat, eroding generations of toil”.
She believes the social internet long ago “uncoupled” from the values and rights-based systems of liberal democracy, to women’s detriment. She says these inequities show up in four different ways.
First, online worlds are largely created by men and for men. Social media, gaming and the very internet has sprung from one of the most male-dominated industries in the modern economy. There are few protections for women built into internet spaces.
Second, the algorithm that tracks your every like, purchase and scroll forces girls and boys in totally different directions.
Andrew Tate, the reigning king of toxic masculinity, has an enormous online following among boys and young men.Credit: AP
Pre-internet, girls and boys, men and women, were mostly consuming the same cultural content. But now, such shared experience is rarer, which increases alienation and misunderstanding between the sexes. As Wilshire puts it: “Gender is one of the key metrics for determining your online universe … divided feeds degrade the empathy groups have towards each other in shared physical life.”
Third, boys and girls do different things on the internet. Boys are more likely to game, girls more likely to look at social media (which is directly correlated with their increasing anxiety levels).
The final difference is in men and women’s commercial experiences online. In the Kardashian sphere, girls are “groomed” to be consumers. Meanwhile, fired by the libertarianism and anti-establishment values of the untamed internet, boys and men are trained to invest in cryptocurrency, NFTs and micro-trading, giving them a sense of power in the new, online economy.
Artificial intelligence, particularly its intersection with pornography, could have a huge impact on gender relations offline.
Large-language models such as ChatGPT work by predicting the next best word in a text, like an “auto-complete function on steroids”, Wilshire says, based on patterns detected in “roughly all the printed words produced by humanity over the course of our written history”. If that history is gender-biased, the bot’s output will be too.
AI also reflects our contemporary selves. One of the first experiments, by Microsoft, of a Twitter chatbot powered by AI, quickly descended into tweeting horrifically antisemitic and misogynistic statements. The more “Tay” interacted with Twitter users, the more cruel and prejudiced it became. Microsoft had to shut it down after 16 hours.
But it is where AI interacts with pornography that the possibilities are most concerning. Deep-fake porn – where the faces of real women and girls are stitched onto incredibly realistic porn images – is a burgeoning genre for online abuse of women.
Traditional, real-life sex workers are already being displaced by their AI versions. Eventually, virtual reality technology and “interactive sex wearables” will mean consumers will be able to buy digital lovers.
The great thing about AI sex? You are in absolute control. Your lover has no needs, and exists to serve yours. She will never punish you for a transgression; she will forgive the worst abuses.
“One of my concerns,” says Wilshire, “is that if an AI experience is someone’s first experience of sexual intimacy or even romantic intimacy, if that becomes someone’s expectation, how does that play out when they have real-life experiences?”
What is the answer? The federal government is talking tough on regulating harmful online content. But it is difficult to see how any government can fully counter such gargantuan forces.
Wilshire argues that the next wave of feminism needs to broaden its base and create a shared, communal movement that counters the dangerous atomisation of the internet.
Otherwise, we risk creating a parallel online society that caters to all the worst instincts of bricks-and-mortar society, but has none of its normative guardrails.
Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and regular columnist.