Honesty, integrity, trust: Media’s AI arms race shames us all
Opinion
While industry big-hitters embraced SXSW London to make generic statements about what they are building with AI, we are collectively ignoring the people we have broken.
Have you heard the one about the media network proclaiming AI excellence while clients receive email bouncebacks from the investment directors they have worked with for decades? Perhaps no-one built an AI tool to inform their “trusted” clients that they no longer work at the company?
Of course, it is flippant to use the pain of redundancy as a punchline in a column. Especially at a time when so many tenacious and talented people are facing it — even when they are on maternity leave.
It might not be generating industry headlines, but the media industry continues to add to the 74,000 women a year who lose their jobs for being pregnant or on maternity leave. We are still content to see women’s careers as collateral in the name of progress.
Now is not the time to look the other way because we are afraid of being labelled troublemakers. We must be unflinching in recognising the unmistakable truth that, as an industry, we have collectively lost our grasp on the importance of honesty, integrity and trust in the race to embrace AI.
Media’s AI arms race is full of red flags
As agencies rush to put their flag in the ground and declare an AI advantage, we must not ignore all the red flags around us.
If jargon is a sign of insecurity, then even a cursory glance at agency sizzle reels underlines the problem we face. Instead of asking difficult questions, we have a sea of meaningless buzzwords and generic statements. In place of humility, we have contributed to a mass humble brag.
For leaders jumping on conference platforms to boast about what they are building with AI, my question is an existential one: why have you ignored what we have broken?
The daily algorithmic pummelling inflicted on women and girls remains almost completely invisible. An avalanche of misogyny. Inclusive AI is an afterthought at best.
Epidemic of misogyny, amplified by AI
Compare the column inches dedicated to protecting copyright in the age of AI with the silence surrounding the colossal harm inflicted on women and girls every single day online.
Imagine a world in which media brands poured the same passion and campaigning zeal into protecting the safety of women and girls as their own business models.
The Toxic Tech: How Misogyny is Shaping Gen Z’s Online Experience report, commissioned by Amnesty International UK, underlined the scale of the problem. More than 70% of Gen Z social media users have witnessed misogynistic content online, with half encountering it on a weekly basis. Almost half of Gen Z women have received unsolicited explicit images, while a similar proportion has been body-shamed.
The University of Kent and University College London’s Safer Scrolling study found that a new young male user typically sees a fourfold increase in the level of misogynistic content suggested by TikTok during an initial five-day period. A diet of misinformation and misogyny that goes some way in explaining why one in five teenage boys believe that feminism has gone too far.
AI is now offering up new tools for misogyny with “deep fakes” — digitally altered images ad video that are difficult to distinguish from a real person, shattering the lives of women and girls.
Academics and media commentators have thus far focused on their impact on powerful men. Yet 96% of all deepfake videos online are pornographic and 99% of deepfake pornography involves women and girls.
In schools across the world, the “creative potential” of AI has extended to young girls dealing with the fallout of this extreme digital abuse.
UK crisis management PR has now expanded to mitigating the reputational damage to the growing number of schools involved, rather than addressing the real problem: unchecked misogyny amplified by AI built for growth, not for good. Schoolboys inhale the daily digital exhaust fumes of hate that make it so easy to treat girls as objects.
The impact on young girls is devastating. The lack of meaningful response from those in power is yet another crushing blow.
As a parent of one schoolgirl victim of deepfakes explained to The Times: “As time passes she is sadly coming to the realisation that this is how it is going to be — something that she will just have to put up with. Not something I ever imagined my daughter, in 2024, would have to accept.”
We’re part of the problem
Yet, in the face of this epidemic of online misogyny supercharged by AI, our industry is actively contributing to this toxic status quo.
Just 12% of machine-learning researchers are women. Meanwhile, 80% of AI professors are men. Our conference stages and column inches are disproportionately dedicated to platforming men.
At a time when such a steady stream of female talent is being pushed out of the industry, we have to place women in the driving seat of an ethical tech revolution. We must platform women’s voices. Let’s stop treating the feelings of powerful men as established fact. Creativity is built on challenging accepted norms.
The media industry’s lacklustre approach to inclusive AI lacks both integrity and ambition. I shouldn’t need to reference Mark Read’s SXSW London clanger that “people are happier in the office” to remind you of the disproportionate impact of powerful men on the entire media ecosystem. AI amplifies this lack of inclusion at scale.
Choose change
Our entire industry continues to be built on the bias of Reference Man: a one-size-fits-no-marginalised-communities approach that suffocates our collective creativity and crush the ambitions and lives of women and girls.
We must have the guts to turn the tide. The media industry has a huge role to play in addressing bias in datasets and raising the standards for accountability and transparency in AI models.
As Laura Bates writes in her groundbreaking book The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny: “If we develop products without prioritising safety and equality at design stage, improving them is always going to be a retractive process that relies on the pain and trauma of oppressed people as one of its building materials. That is simply too high a price to pay for ‘progress’.”
In the current climate, basic integrity is in danger of being painted as a politicised act. Having the humility to ask better questions places you on the wrong side of an increasingly polarised media ecosystem.
The simple truth remains that we all have a choice to reject misogyny. We must refuse to accept a model of progress that continues to crush women and girls. We can do better — but only if we stop pretending we have all the answers.
Nicola Kemp has spent over two decades writing about diversity, equality and inclusion in the media. She is now editorial director of Creativebrief. She writes for The Media Leader each month.