The Guardian

06/03/2025

It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “gold rush-type of scenario”. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”. Or they can “chat” with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, “your clumsy older sister” who is described as “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother”.

This million-dollar money generator is just one of thousands of applications of this new technology that are re-embedding misogyny deep into the foundations of our future. On other sites men can create, share and weaponise fake intimate images to terrorise women and girls. Sex robots are being developed at breakneck speed. Already, you can buy a self-warming, self-lubricating or “sucking” model: some manufacturers have dreamed up a “frigid” setting that would allow their users to simulate rape. Millions of men are already using AI “companions” – virtual girlfriends, available and subservient 24/7, whose breast size and personality they can customise and manipulate.

Meanwhile, generative AI, which has exploded in popularity, has been proven to regurgitate and amplify misogyny and racism. This becomes significantly more of a concern when you realise just how much online content will soon be created by this new tool.

Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with a website called FaceMash, which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of Facebook.)