Recently I watched a BBC Panorama documentary (Panorama: How Safe is TikTok for young users?) about the dark side of TikTok. Whilst I don’t use the app myself, I have witnessed its addictive nature in my peers as they spend hours scrolling through the different videos. TikTok is also unique in the way that it presents content – recommended videos automatically start playing with no option to not watch, no matter how distressing the content. TikTok recommends content depending on engagement levels with previous content – if lots of content surrounding one topic is consumed/interacted with, more content on that topic will be shown to the viewer. This is achieved through the use of artificial intelligence and data mining which monitors a user’s previous behaviour. Whilst TikTok can censor content, lots of content also slips through the cracks. This problem was demonstrated during the documentary as a new account was set up by a presenter which quickly showed distressing content. Given that this was the first video that the presenter “liked”, the algorithm took this into account and started showing more distressing content. Cycles like these often have fatal consequences, including the case of British teenager Mia Janin, a 14-year-old girl who committed suicide following repeated interaction with distressing content online. The documentary also provided lots of other interesting cases, but sadly is only available for viewers in the UK.
Another documentary produced by ITV (Laura Whitmore Investigates: Women Haters? The Truth About Incels), which is also only available in the UK, discussed the impact of social media’s role in increasing men’s misogynistic views. One figure that comes to mind is Andrew Tate, a British-American kickboxer with a large social media presence. Andrew Tate is perhaps most famous for his sexist views, particularly his views on women being submissive to men and that women, for some strange reason, bear some responsibility if they get raped. When asked why he lives in Romania, Tate cited the fact that rape laws are less harsh than in the UK or America. [Romanian law states that while rape is illegal, if rape does not result in death, police officers are allowed to investigate at their discretion and can reject cases]. Whilst the Meta Group (Facebook and Instagram) have blocked Tate’s use of their services, Tate is still active on Twitter, a site particularly famous for its emphasis on free speech and lack of censorship. Many of Tate’s social media following consist of young, impressionable boys who often mirror what they are taught online and can become desensitised to such misogyny. This is already being reflected in the fact that there is a growing divide between the political ideologies of young men and women around the world; young men are becoming more conservative, whereas young women are becoming more liberal. For instance, there is a gap of at least 30 percentage points between the number of young liberal American women (~40%) compared to the number of young liberal American men (~5%). (1) As is the case with lots of distressing and controversial social media content, it is not
explicitly sought out by the user, but instead either presented by the algorithm on the user’s feed or shown to them by a friend who interacts with the material.
But the news only gets worse.
One internet trend that has been increasing in popularity over the last few years is “Incelism”. First gaining popularity in the 1990’s, the term “Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate”- i.e. a man who isn’t in a relationship who wants to be in one. Many incels blame women for this, often making derogatory remarks and hating women just for simply being women. Over the last few years, hate crimes against women in the name of incelism have been on the rise, with prominent mass shootings carried out by figures such as Elliot Rodger. When asked why they carry out these attacks, many claim that their main mission is to just kill women, with other victims simply being collateral damage. And these men wonder why women will not date them.
However, social media isn’t the only problem with AI. The recent rapid advancements of AI, particularly generative AI, has resulted in the creation of AI “romance bots” – a chat bot that acts as a romantic partner. Originally the stuff of movies, human-android relationships have been growing in popularity over the last ten years. I can see the theoretical appeal: they are more convenient than human relationships as less effort has to be made to sustain the relationship, chat bots are less likely to have conflicting life goals and are less likely to want to break up. In 2014, researchers at Microsoft created Al Xiaoice, a chatbot posing as an 18-year-old woman. Many of Al’s followers are, somewhat unsurprisingly, Chinese men. As someone who has used ChatGPT to simulate this scenario out of curiosity, it was scary how humanlike the conversation was. I believe that this is a dangerous lifestyle choice. Humans are being discouraged from pursuing relationships with others – this can weaken social skills, leading to less meaningful relationships, as well as decrease the number of romantic relationships between humans, ultimately leading to falling birth rates – which are currently unsustainably low.
I believe that artificial intelligence companies will drastically shape the world through the release of their software. Whilst artificial intelligence has many useful applications, such as Samsung’s new real-time translation feature for foreign language calls, as I have just discussed, I believe that artificial intelligence can also be a very dangerous tool. I hope that new laws are put into place by world governments in order to mitigate the damage already being done to society.
References
1. A new global gender divide is emerging. (n.d.). https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998