AI is not a toy if you kill me with it
Stop telling women to be excited about the new uses of generative AI when the first thing it did was hurt us
There's a word for how I'm feeling, but "frustration" seems so small. "Anger" just doesn’t seem to cover it. What I feel is a raw, seething rage tinged with the particular flavor of exhaustion that comes from being gaslit about your own reality. I'm a software engineer. I understand how AI works. I appreciate its potential. But I'm also a woman who's watched, in real-time, each new AI advancement being weaponized against us faster than you can say "ethical guidelines."
So when I look at these men — the tech bros, the optimistic engineers, the ones who smile while saying "AI is going to change the world!" And all I can think is: Must be nice, huh? Must be nice to stand on top of the world, see “possibility” everywhere, and not feel the weight of what it’s doing to people like me.
They talk about how amazing it is that AI can generate anything. Anything. They say it like we’re on the edge of the greatest creative explosion humanity’s ever seen. But you know what “anything” means for women? It means discovering your professional headshot has been used to generate thousands of degrading variations. It means finding entire communities dedicated to "AI art" of girls and women from their communities. It means watching male colleagues excitedly discuss AI features in public while their browser tabs show Discord servers where they're using those same features to humiliate women.
Now don’t get me wrong: AI certainly didn’t start this. I’ve always been just a girl on the internet, long before the first generative tools (well not that long, i’m only 23). Since I was a teenager I’ve faced photomontages of my face on pornstars’ bodies, received endless death threats and aggressive sexual comments, and been forced to accept that my mere presence on a forum is enough to ignite an explosive mix of hatred and obsession.
But the scales have dramatically changed. They used to need dozens of hours, specialized software and some talent to make those pictures, they now only require 10 seconds and a free account. AI has made the process so much faster and more realistic. It looks real, it feels real – and with every new picture, my brain, my body reacts as if i’m truly here – and in a way i am there because the tech is just that good.
The internet was a space where I could control what I wanted to share about myself, where it was moderately safe to nerd out about my interests and share them with strangers. Now, AI has stolen even that. Remember the old advice: “Don’t send photos you wouldn’t want your mom to see”? It was already useless, but now, it’s a sick joke. You don’t have to send anything for your likeness to be out there, taken and twisted. A headshot selfie posted on social media when you were 12, a random picture of you in the street taking without your permission — it’s all fair game, fed to AI, slapped onto a body you recognize all too well because the tech is that good. Now it's what? Don't show your face? Don't dare to be a woman in tech? Don't exist online?
I live in two worlds now. In one, I'm sitting in a bright conference room at a prestigious tech conference, watching the latest demo of an AI image generator. "Look what it can do!" he exclaims, generating masterful landscapes and whimsical characters. The room buzzes with possibility. In the other world – the one I inhabit as soon as the lights dim down– I'm frantically filing another DMCA takedown request because someone used that same technology to generate pornographic images of me and every other female speaker whose face was on the brochure.
While men are off tinkering, calling it “creativity,” we’re over here, backpedaling, forced to imagine all the ways they can twist our digital selves into some grotesque revenge fantasy just because we dared to exist.
Not me, you protest – “I’d never used it like that”, “that’s not what we built it for!” And you probably didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that your new shiny toy has generated porn from a photo of me at graduation. That I get DMed thousands of lines of “torture fanfic” in which I am the main character. It means revenge porn made of women who just wanted to exist in a digital world. Men who can’t seem to make peace with the fact that we’re just here, online, and now they have a machine to punish us, and it doesn’t need time to reload.
And let’s say I speak up. Who’s going to listen? The very people I’d be talking to are the ones who let this happen in the first place. They’re the ones grinning while telling me how “incredible” this all is. When I say, “This is what it’s doing to me,” I’m dismissed, and laughed at. At best there’s an awkward silence - “it sucks, i’m so sorry”. Maybe they’d get defensive, say it’s “not their fault.” They’d shrug and tell me that this is the price of living online – but how much are they paying? Cause it sure looks like they’ve been grandfathered in the unlimited free plan while i’m crumbling under the pink tax!
The same men who pride themselves on their logical thinking somehow can't – or won't – connect the dots between their enthusiastic adoption of AI tools and the explosion of AI-generated harassment we face.
I have recently graduated and start my first job as a software engineer. I’m very happy that i managed to find a good company and a great team that isn’t discriminating against me. But still AI hangs over my head, because i can’t bring myself to look excited every time the subject comes up at lunch. This industry is so saturated with the expectation that we should all be “bullish” on AI, that admitting doubt is like drawing a line on your own career.
It’s subtle, but it’s dangerous. Being called a “luddite” in my field could be career-ending. I know they’ll never put it in my performance review directly, but it’ll sit there, lingering in their minds: “She’s not forward-thinking.” “She’s resistant to change.” As if I’m just too scared or too slow to see the potential. I’m afraid that’s the thought they’ll have whenever I suggest that maybe, maybe there’s a cost to all this progress.
A cost that falls on me and other women like me, every single day. Because the people who aren’t on board with this unrelenting optimism don’t get the benefit of “just asking questions.” We’re supposed to be enthusiastic, or we risk being seen as the weakest link. And that’s how this toxic ideal spreads: it tells us we can either buy in or get out of the way. That we can either “get with the times” or “risk becoming obsolete.”
This isn't about being anti-progress. It's about demanding progress that doesn't treat women's safety as an afterthought. It's about acknowledging that if your technology is immediately used to terrorize half the population, maybe – just maybe – we need to rethink how we're approaching making new toys.
Sometimes I feel like a 19th-century textile worker watching the mechanical loom transform my world. I'm not naive – I know we can't stuff this genie back in its bottle. The harassment, the degrading photoshops, the violations – they existed before AI. But there was a barrier to entry then: time, skill, dedication. It was still violation, still trauma, but it wasn't this endless, automated flood. Now? Anyone with a grudge and a smartphone can generate hundreds of degrading images in minutes. The industrial revolution of harassment has arrived, and women are all caught in its machines.
This isn’t a revolution we control. It’s one pointed directly at us, like a weapon that someone else gets to wield, and it feels an awful lot like being back in the 1960s when we couldn’t enter bars and were therefore excluded from any space of conversation that mattered. I can’t be on Twitter anymore because i’ll get lynched, Reddit was never a safe space; Instagram is photo-based. Our little forums, with strong moderation and a majority of female users have dwindled down or been closed by puritans with fake morality arguments to protect the youth. Remember Tumblr? ffnet? Don’t try to tell me they were worse for girls than the surface of Twitter!
They love to say, “Well, just tell us what you want instead,” like it’s our job to make their tech safe. I’d love to see them live one week like this — they’re not the ones left scrubbing their digital selves off websites and out of Discord servers, always wondering how much of themselves is still out there. They can’t fathom it, and maybe they don’t even care to. For them, AI’s promise is a toy, a thrill. For us, it’s a shadow we’re forced to fight.
So yes, AI is “changing the world,” but not for the better. It’s changing our world in ways they’ll never know, or care to acknowledge. Their optimism feels like the cheapest betrayal, a cold reminder that they’ll never bear the consequences of the “future” they’re so eager to build. They don’t have to live with the nightmare scenarios we see, playing out in the background of every “exciting” AI advancement they celebrate. And that, that’s what makes it all so unbearable.
Next time AI comes up in the conversation, take a moment to look around your social circles. Notice who's laughing nervously. Notice who's quiet. Notice who's slowly disappearing from online spaces. Your experience of this technology isn't universal, and your excitement shouldn't come at the cost of our safety. You got a toy; I got the old targets on my back painted a brand new shade of red.
…a.i. problems >>>> a.i. solutions…it is going to hurt us way more than it will save or embetter us…and i say us knowing that so many working on it will definitely be materially better/stronger/faster because of it…but me…luddite…people person…i don’t get a choice about not using it or having it belittle and destroy what little money i made in art because of it…we should never forget that the first problems a.i. chose to solve were art, music, photography, and writing…they chose to focus on creativity as the first target of their mirth…it’s funny because most people wouldn’t want to be bit by a vampire…but they will dangle a dozen different ways what a.i. has done and how it did it as noble and novel…righteous and valuable…then i try to find an old record online and the only search results are fake bands pretending to be real…the fact that barely anyone calls their ai creativity “ai creativity” speaks to it as a replacer, not its own thing…just this week a friend who uses suno told me he makes music now…i’m sorry but it is just a fax, a xerox, and another way technologists seek to dehumanize this experience…end rant…as one of the many bitten by this tech i feel confident and comfortable in saying loudly… A.I. SUCKS …
If anyone put me in the position of holding the cord in the wall to all of AI I’d give it a permanent yank without a moment’s hesitation. On behalf of the male side that cares, I am so sorry you face the careless deployment of the tool. My only personal recourse is not to use it. Thank you for your beautifully written, articulate and powerful article.