Well, when AI is coded with the same sexist ideologies and biases that are dominant in our society, we can’t expect AI’s not to further perpetuate that. Which is why, we’re best off without it. And no, having a therapist that is encoded with sexism is not a great idea!

Now you could argue that’s a step in the right direction. Or that it’s not nearly enough. Should AI not be used as a tool to call out sexual harassment, make it clear that it is unacceptable?

Young explains that there have been changes, such as Amazon AI now choosing to disengage when it receives sexual harassment by saying something like “I’m not going to respond to that.”

Similarly, if someone was to sexually harass a chatbot by saying something like “I want to have sex with you”, the chatbot would respond with something flirty like “I’d blush if I could”.

For one, she discovered that chat bots were often tolerating sexually abusive language such as when a user was to say “you’re a slut!” and the chatbot would respond with something like “Thank you for the feedback”.

Josie Young gave a TED Talk in 2018 explaining her perspective on why we need to design feminist AI. In this talk, she explores the ways chat bots respond to sexual harassment or sexually abusive language. Examples to come;

We could talk about the environmental harms in terms of water usage for cooling systems with AI, or we could talk about the potential harmful impacts to our brain development but I wanna focus on one specific thing; misogyny