Vol. 15 No. 2 (2024): MEDIA EDUCATION – Studi, ricerche e buone pratiche
Articles

Artificial violence. VAW and the dark side of artificial intelligence

PDF
  • Simona Tirocchi
Simona Tirocchi
University of Turin, Italy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/me-16542

Published 2024-12-30

Keywords

  • AI literacy,
  • artificial intelligence,
  • cyberviolence,
  • gender education,
  • replika,
  • VAW
    • ...More
    Less

Copyright (c) 2024 Simona Tirocchi

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Violence against women is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon, involving millions of people worldwide, reinforcing the condition of social inequality that has historically relegated women to a subordinate position, within a framework of inequality and discrimination. The development of digital technologies (Web 2.0, social media, digital platforms) and, more recently, artificial intelligence, is contributing to the emergence of new, sometimes more insidious than traditional ones, forms of violence, raising questions about how to combat them. Specifically, the article proposes a theoretical reflection on the new forms of digital violence enabled by technology, with a focus on the case of the chatbot Replika. The qualitative and quantitative expansion of violence poses new media-education challenges, particularly regarding the need to design and propose new forms of prevention suited to this new landscape and to strengthen specific AI Literacy.

PDF

References

  1. Aufderheide P. (1993). Media Literacy: A Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy. Aspen Institute.
  2. Backe E. L., Lilleston P., & McCleary-Sills J. (2018). Networked individuals, gendered violence: A literature review of cyberviolence. Violence and gender, 5(3), 135-146.
  3. Belluati M. (2021). Femminicidio. Una lettura tra realtà e rappresentazione. Carocci.
  4. Belluati M., Tirocchi S. (2023). Sociologia della comunicazione e degli ambienti mediali, Milano: Pearson.
  5. Boccia Artieri G., Gemini L., Pasquali F., Carlo S., Farci M. & Pedroni M. (2017). Fenomenologia dei social network. Presenza, relazioni e consumi mediali degli italiani online, Guerini.
  6. Bourdieu P. (2001). Masculine domination. Polity.
  7. Cannito M., Crowhurst I., Ferrero Camoletto R., Mercuri E., & Quaglia V. (2021). Fare maschilità online: definire e indagare la manosphere. AG-ABOUT GENDER, 10(19), 1-41.
  8. Cho H., Cannon J., Lopez R., & Li W. (2024). Social media literacy: A conceptual framework. New media & society, 26(2), 941-960.
  9. Cole S. (2023). ‘My AI Is Sexually Harassing Me’: Replika Users Say the Chatbot Has Gotten Way Too Horny, January 12, 2023.
  10. Corbisiero F., Nocenzi M. (2022). (Eds). Manuale di educazione al genere e alla sessualità. Utet.
  11. Crenshaw K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, n. 1.
  12. de Beauvoir S. (1952). The second sex. New York: Bantam books.
  13. Depounti I., Saukko P., & Natale S. (2023). Ideal technologies, ideal women: AI and gender imaginaries in Redditors’ discussions on the Replika bot girlfriend. Media, Culture & Society, 45(4), 720-736.
  14. Doda I. (2023). Il chatbot Replika ha iniziato a molestare sessualmente gli utenti. Nato come un “amico virtuale”, a volte ha oltrepassato i limiti, Wired, Retrieved from: https://www.wired.it/article/chatbot-replika-molestie-sessuali/
  15. Dunn S. (2020). “Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: An Overview”, Centre for International Governance Innovation: Supporting a Safer Internet Paper No 1. Retrieved from https://www.cigionline.org/static/documents/SaferInternet_Paper_no_1_coverupdate.pdf
  16. EIGE (2022), Combating Cyber Violence against Women and Girls, Retrieved from https://eige.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/combating_cyber_violence_against_women_and_girls.pdf
  17. European Commission Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men (2020). Opinion on combating online violence against women, April 2020.
  18. European Commission, Eurostat (2022). EU survey on gender-based violence against woman and other forms of inter-personal violence (EU-GBV) – first results. 2022 Edition. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/7870049/15323622/KS-FT-22-005-EN-N.pdf/315d443b-ba8d-e607-3ce0-845f642a8c00?version=1.0&t=1669371271599
  19. European Commission (2024). What is gender-based violence? Retrieved from https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/gender-equality/gender-based-violence/what-gender-based-violence_en
  20. Farci M. & Righetti N. (2019). Italian Men’s Rights Activism and the Online Backlash Against Feminism. Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 4, 765-781.
  21. Farci M. & Scarcelli C. M. (2021). Media digitali, genere e sessualità. Mondadori.
  22. Farci M. & Ricci O. (2025). “I Do Not Believe that Talking About this Kind of Stuff is a Way to Diminish Feminist Battles.”An Online Controversy in the Italian Manosphere. In The Routledge International Handbook of Online Deviance (pp. 321-338). Routledge.
  23. Floridi L. (2015). The ONLIFE MANIFESTO: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. Springer Nature.
  24. García-Ull, F. J., & Melero-Lázaro, M. (2023). Gender stereotypes in AI-generated images. Profesional de la información, 32(5).
  25. Gengler E. J. (2024). Sexism, Racism, and Classism: Social Biases in Text-to-Image Generative AI in the Context of Power, Success, and Beauty, Wirtschaftsinformatik 2024 Proceedings. 48.
  26. https://aisel.aisnet.org/wi2024/48
  27. Gill R. (2007). Gender and the Media. Polity.
  28. Gius C. (2023). (Re) thinking gender in cyber-violence. Insights from awareness-raising campaigns on online violence against women and girls in Italy. Media Education, 14(2), 95-106.
  29. Hepp A. (2020). Deep mediatization. Routledge.
  30. Hong J. W., Choi S. & Williams D. (2020). Sexist AI: an experiment integrating CASA and ELM. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 36(20), 1928-1941.
  31. Horvát E. Á. & González-Bailón S. (2024). Quantifying gender disparities and bias online: editors’ introduction to “Gender Gaps in Digital Spaces” special issue. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 29(1), zmad054.
  32. Jandrić P., Knox J., Besley T., Ryberg T., Suoranta J. & Hayes S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893-899.
  33. Jiang J., Vetter M. A. & Lucia B. (2024). Toward a ‘More-Than-Digital’AI Literacy: Reimagining Agency and Authorship in the Postdigital Era with ChatGPT. Postdigital Science and Education, 1-18.
  34. Laestadius L., Bishop A., Gonzalez M., Illenčík D. & Campos-Castillo C. (2022). Too human and not human enough: A grounded theory analysis of mental health harms from emotional dependence on the social chatbot Replika. New Media & Society.
  35. Lalli P. (2021). (Ed.). L’amore non uccide. Femminicidio e discorso pubblico: cronaca, tribunali, politiche. il Mulino.
  36. Lamensch M. (2023). Generative AI Tools Are Perpetuating Harmful Gender Stereotypes. These new systems reflect the inequitable, racist and sexist biases of their source material. CIGI. Retrieved from https://www.cigionline.org/articles/generative-ai-tools-are-perpetuating-harmful-gender-stereotypes/
  37. Livingstone S. (2004). Media literacy and the challenge of new information and communication technologies. The communication review, 7(1), 3-14.
  38. Long D. & Magerko B. (2020, April). What is AI literacy? Competencies and design considerations. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-16).
  39. Marwick A. E. & Caplan R. (2018). Drinking male tears: Language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. Feminist media studies, 18(4), 543-559.
  40. Natale S. & Depounti I. (2024). Artificial sociality. Human-Machine Communication Journal, 7(5), 83-98.
  41. Ng D. T. K., Leung J. K. L., Chu S. K. W. & Qiao M. S. (2021). Conceptualizing AI literacy: An exploratory review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2, 100041.
  42. Pentina I., Hancock T. & Xie T. (2023). Exploring relationship development with social chatbots: A mixed-method study of replika. Computers in Human Behavior, 140, 107600.
  43. Potter, W. J. (2019). Seven skills of Media literacy. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
  44. Ricaurte P. (2022). Ethics for the majority world: AI and the question of violence at scale. Media, Culture & Society, 44(4), 726-745.
  45. Simonovic D. (2020). UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences on online Violence Against Women and girls from a human rights perspective. Retrieved from https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1641160.
  46. Skjuve M., Følstad A., Fostervold KI & Brandtzaeg P. B. (2021). My Chatbot companion: a study of humanchatbot relationships. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, 102601.
  47. Song X., Xu B. & Zhao Z. (2022). Can people experience romantic love for artificial intelligence? An empirical study of intelligent assistants. Information & Management, 59(2),103595.
  48. Taddeo G. (2024), Artificial intelligence literacy: aspetti sociali e educative di una nuova frontiera dell’educazione. In R. Ricucci, A. Rosa (Eds.). Didattica per competenze e orizzonti educativi. La prospettiva Lifelong Learning (pp. 105-122). Pensa Multimedia.
  49. Tirocchi S. (2024). Digital education. Dalla scuola digitale all’intelligenza artificiale. DigitCult – Scientific Journal on Digital Cultures, 8(2), 75-89. ISSN 2531-5994. Retrieved from https://digitcult.lim.di.unimi.it/index.php/dc/article/view/254
  50. Tirocchi S. (forthcoming), Más allá del “hype”. Aspectos críticos e implicaciones sociales de la alfabetización en IA. In (Ed.) Defensoría del Público de Argentina, “Alfabetización Mediática e Informacional en la era de la IA”.
  51. Tirocchi S., Scocco M. & Crespi I. (2022). Generation Z and cyberviolence: between digital platforms use and risk awareness. International Review of Sociology, 32(3), 443-462.
  52. UNESCO (2021). Raccomandazione UNESCO su L’etica dell’IA: Modellare il future delle nostre società. Retrieved from: https://www.unesco.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Brochure-su-Raccomandazione-UNESCO-sullIntelligenza-Artificiale-1.pdf
  53. World Health Organization (2024). Violence against women. Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
  54. Xie T. & Pentina, I. (2022). Attachment theory as a framework to understand relationships with social chatbots: a case study of Replika. In: Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii international conference on system sciences, 4 January.
  55. Yi Y. (2021). Establishing the concept of AI literacy: Focusing on competence and purpose. JAHR-European Journal of Bioethics, 12 (2), 353-368.