UNESCO releases a study on gender-based violence facilitated by regenerative Artificial Intelligence

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has published a recent study that seeks to analyze how the use of regenerative artificial intelligence can amplify technology-enabled forms of gender-based violence (TFGBV) in diverse online communities. According to the organization, the main findings are as follows:

Although there are no global statistics on sexual and gender-based violence in the era of generative AI, there are relevant global estimates from 2020 showing that 58% of young women around the world have faced some type of gender-based violence on social media platforms. In addition, most of the apps developed to help women be safer on the Internet make it up to the victim to protect themselves against online harm.

The proliferation of generative AI brings with it new dangers, such as the creation of more realistic false content, “hallucinations” or involuntary biases in the results, automated harassment campaigns and the possibility of constructing “synthetic stories”, false and believable narratives.

Generative AI can lead to an increase in the number of attackers, the creation of sustained and automated attacks, and the generation of convincingly written content such as messages, texts and emails. This means that existing harms such as hate speech, cyberbullying, disinformation and impersonation - all of which are among the five most common vectors of sexual and gender-based violence - have a much wider reach and are more dangerous.

AI models can generate cyberbullying templates and modify images to portray people in a variety of non-consensual scenarios. The demonstration also highlights how these generative harms of AI can be used to spread some of the most common harms of sexual and gender-based violence today, such as impersonation, piracy and harassment, and cyberbullying.

The fight against the damage caused by the TFGBV requires a combination of measures both on the part of technology developers and the companies that serve as their platform, specific actions on the part of civil society organizations, regulation and policies on the part of governments, and individual awareness.