I am a woman working in tech. As a closing story for 2023 and an inspiring one for 2024, I am taking the settling of AI as an inflection point to raise awareness about image generation, consent, deepfake risks and equality.
When I read the story of Francesca Mani, a 15-year old girl victim of a deepfake by her own classmates, I got extremely disgusted… and scared. How can anyone expose fake porn images of another person like that? The more I learnt about AI deepfake risks, the more terrifying it got.
I tried to find some answers at the Ethics of AI Masterclass of the Ethical Commerce Alliance Education page. Ethics is not supposed to be comfortable, easy and beautiful. It is about speaking about what is wrong and speaking up against it, questioning our own actions continuously to, lastly, reach that coveted “common good”. How can we implement ethics into AI?
According to Europol Innovation Lab observatory, around 90% of the total content we consume on the Internet will be produced through or with the help of AI by 2026.
AI Image Generation can look much more realistic with celebrities, artists and people with a high presence on media as it is easier to train the tools the larger the number of face content they can get. In most cases, these individuals have not been asked for consent to whether their pictures could be used to train AI models or to create artificial videos with their faces on them.
This is when it got personal. I have started posting short videos to announce news and basically share my thoughts on the topics we cover daily at the ECA (digital ethics, AI, data privacy, eCommerce…). More content out there means more risk to be a victim of deepfake. Does that mean we should all stop creating content online?
We, as women in society, have been told to dress a certain way, to behave ‘accordingly’, to not be here and there during certain hours, to refrain from doing certain things… We have heard it so many times, and yet we are facing a new chapter of this story with AI.
Research has shown that overall this type of online abuse and harassment disproportionately affects women.” (Agnes E. Venema, Women in International Security).
It is not only about deepfakes. It is not only the fear we are experiencing, it is the social and mental repercussions it leads to. Because it does not resonate enough. Women’s presence in AI is being forgotten.
My conclusion for this post is bringing an understandable framework of what I think is the basis for an equal and recognising tech context. At the ECA, we have tackled so many different aspects of digital ethics, innovation and AI, and, for me, it is all summed up as stated below:
EDUCATION → DESIGN → REGULATION → CORRECTION → EDUCATION
How do we get out of this vicious circle? We must start with awareness, the first pillar to address this challenge. Being aware of what we lack, what we could be facing in the future and what this means for our society as a whole.
Education serves as the bedrock, opening our minds to a respectful future. Simultaneously, the educated individuals will be more likely to opt for the design of ethical AI tools (and, as we have been reading in recent news, most of those development teams are not very diverse, jeopardising the visibility and opinions from women). Consequently, regulatory measures must evolve swiftly, adapting to the rapidly changing technological landscape to prevent the misuse of AI-generated content.
And correction. Acknowledging and rectifying the errors, the ethical missteps, and the damages caused by AI-generated content becomes crucial in rebuilding trust and reclaiming authenticity in our digital interactions.
AI has come to stay and it is now our turn and responsibility to handle it with consciousness, ethically and focus, for everyone to feel safe online, and most importantly, offline. This is our time to make it equal.
As a woman, I am socially moved to ask myself: am I being too dramatic?
I would love to hear your thoughts about this topic. Talking about it is the first step.
