Is Using AI in Business a Feminist Act?

*Content note- in this article, I mention enslavement & sexual abuse*

There's something I used to do a lot that I try not to do much anymore- arguing about whether or not something is feminist. A business practice, a consumer habit, a piece of language... I realised somewhere along the way that the gulf between what I mean when I say feminist vs what some others mean is SO ENORMOUS that there's no scaffolding for the debate.

Lola Olufemi writes, "I feel embarrassed when I sat feminism and people do no think revolution in service of every living thing". Same babes, same.

Whereas this Gabrielle Alexa Noel tweet contrasts, "white feminism's blueprint for empowerment is always about women participating in capitalism the way men do, and rarely about imagining a world where everyone's basic needs are met".

As the meaning making around feminism is stretched across time, I notice how even the segments of people who profess to have done their anti-racist work and to have gone beyond the girl bossery to a more intersectional perspective seem to snap back to neoliberalism when something new comes along. And this is what happens when we haven't fully integrated what we imagine we've learned.

Last week, a client told me she watched a TikTok from a feminist business coach saying (obvs I'm paraphrasing second hand information here) that she wouldn't argue with all the ways in which AI is bad for the climate, for for people living in those climates and for artists and creatives, but at the end of the day- everyone else is using it so your moral abstinence is only hurting yourself. You're gonna get let behind, invisible, because everyone else is gonna get more efficient and productive, and so there will be less caring people able to get their message out. So it's actually the feminist thing to embrace it.

And all I could think about was a group of white women, wives of plantation owners, standing around having the same conversation if someone objected to the enslavement of human beings as the latest 'technology'. Everyone else is doing it, so you may as well hun, or you'll be less rich, less prolific, less powerful. Think of your seat at the table. Think of the social hierarchy. Never mind the suffering, it's not really your responsibility.

This may seem like a huge overreaction to you- if so, I wonder how much you've digested about AI and its demands on the planet, on our imaginations, on our psyches...

Here's a start.

​Open AI (creator of ChatGPT) used Kenyan workers on less than $2 an hour. "To build that safety system, OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user." $2 an hour to view violence, hate speech and sexual abuse so that we can ask ChatGPT to act like our drunk besties.

Or how about this...

​Meta executive (Nick Clegg) says asking artists permission to use their artwork would "basically kill the AI industry". And this at the same time as the Government saying they're cracking down on people using those streaming sticks for TV- corporations can steal from people, people can't steal from corporations, got it.

And finally, this...

​"Your cloud is drying my river". Big tech's new data centres will take water from the driest areas. "With 75% of the country already at risk of desertification, the combination of the climate crisis and datacentre expansion is “bringing Spain to the verge of ecological collapse”, Jaume-Palasí said."

And I haven't even had time here to get into what I think and feel about what the normalisation of AI is doing to our collective capacity for developing critical thought and creativity, and perhaps especially the implications of this for children and young people.

Feeling stressed out after reading this? Don't worry, Deepak Chopra has a digital twin you can chat to for spiritual guidance.

Friends- I am not saying there are *never* *any* "good" uses of AI. I would be delusional to imagine I'd thought of everything, or every ethical trade off. But I am saying that I disagree entirely that embracing something that is so violent for the sake of keeping up with productivity norms is anything to do with feminism.

In love and solidarity from this fresh layer of hell! Keri x