AI as a tool for feminists

[ArabellaScott]

(I've used AI to create this post.)

Used properly, AI can be a useful tool for grassroots campaigning and feminist organising. It can help search large volumes of material quickly, locate policies and legislation, summarise reports, identify contradictions, draft letters, prepare FOIs, adapt campaign materials, make graphics, and lower the barrier to producing polished public-facing content. For people with limited time, energy, money, or institutional backing, it can be a force multiplier.

Task it with a specific question - this morning I've been digging into how Kooth is funded, for example - and it will pull links to the relevant docs. You just have to follow the links and check the info at source. (It does make confident bullshit assertions. It cannot do sums).

It is also useful for seeing how political issues are being framed and filtered. Ask AI about prostitution, motherhood, domestic violence, sex-based rights, pornography, surrogacy, or gender identity, and patterns emerge very quickly: which language is treated as neutral, which viewpoints are softened or marginalised, which sources are prioritised, and what assumptions are built into the answers. As AI systems become embedded in search engines, schools, workplaces, moderation systems, customer service, and journalism, those framings will shape how millions of people encounter political ideas.

AI should be treated like a fast, plausible, but often unreliable assistant.
It hallucinates, blurs certainty and speculation. It reproduces biases from the material it is trained on, including misogyny, political bias, and the distortions of online culture. (Bear in mind it uses Reddit as a source). It also tends to flatten language and produce generic, over-smoothed argument.

So:

• check sources directly
• verify quotes
• edit heavily
• keep your own voice
• do your own thinking

(There are also real concerns about environmental cost, data scraping, labour exploitation, surveillance, and corporate concentration of power.)

A non exhaustive list of how AI can help with your activism:

Research.

AI is basically an extremely fast research assistant. Useful for finding legislation, policies, consultations, contacts, archived articles, statistics, court judgments, timelines, quotes, institutional links, and summarising long reports or legal documents. Often much faster than conventional search engines for navigating large amounts of material. Ask for links to sources and check them.

Letter writing.

Good for adapting campaign letters so organisations do not receive hundreds of identical emails. You can ask it to change tone, shorten, personalise, target a specific institution, or rewrite for clarity. Particularly useful for people who struggle with confidence, time, fatigue, or formal writing. Always read through and check before sending.

Influencing AI outputs.

Public AI systems are shaped by the material they ingest and by patterns of interaction. Feeding accurate information, sources, arguments, and corrections into the ecosystem is worthwhile. Bad information online shapes outputs too.

Design.

Useful for posters, memes, flyers, campaign graphics, slogans, layouts, infographics, mockups, stickers, social media assets, and quick visual prototyping.

A final reminder: CHECK EVERYTHING AT SOURCE and EDIT!

Anything is a tool for feminists if feminists want to use it.

Struggling to see what point you think you’re making.

Well, snap, mate.

I read on another thread a poem that the poster had got AI to write. The AI had refused to do a parody of, iirc, 'Gordon is a Moron' because copyright(?) but with the prompts it had been given it had written one of the best takedowns of GI I've read. Unfortunately, I can't remember the poster or the thread😢. Possibly a...I want to write one of the recent JKR ones?

Women here have used AI a good bit for entertainment. I'm finding it really helpful for research at the moment, though. Instead of wading through websites etc.

Another thing - if you rip a video or audio from the net (lots of software out there for this) - AI can transcribe it for you. Usual caveats about checking for accuracy apply!

AI CAN do sums. I use it for extremely complex calculations, including the kind that need scientific calculators that I don’t know how to work.

You can also use one AI model to check the work of another.

ETA: It can also write code for you.

The trouble is if you can't check the results, though? It does, often, get even very basic arithmetic catastrophically and obviously very wrong.

It is excellent at helping with software problems, I agree!

25% less Women than Men are advancing in AI skills and the gap will grow. Thanks for starting this topic. It’s imperative we learn how best to use it as a tool of insurgence and protection from greater loss of rights.

practical uses - know your employment law to reduce discrimination. Understanding legal and financial situations when leaving relationships. Identifying where to get support from etc.

it will be a great tool for women and for lots of different reasons everywhere.

Wikipedia was pretty quickly taken over by anti-women bias. That's well documented.

AI risks going the same way if we are not aware of the risks.

I guess we need a feminist SWOT analysis of it.

Strengths

• Speeds up research, admin, drafting, transcription, and campaign work
• Helps small groups produce professional materials cheaply
• Improves accessibility for disabled, dyslexic, time-poor, or inexperienced activists
• Useful for analysing media framing, policy documents, and institutional language
• Can help recover and organise feminist archives and histories

Weaknesses

• Reproduces biases from internet culture and institutions
• Dominated by large male-led tech corporations
• Encourages generic language and shallow thinking if overused
• Can produce misinformation confidently
• Relies on extractive labour and energy-intensive infrastructure

Opportunities

• Stronger independent feminist media and publishing
• Faster scrutiny of governments, NGOs, schools, healthcare systems, etc.
• Better political education and legal literacy tools
• International collaboration through translation and communication tools
• More women gaining access to technical and analytical capacities

Threats

• Deepfake pornography and synthetic sexual abuse
• Automated misogyny, harassment, and propaganda
• Further normalisation of pornified and commodified representations of women
• Surveillance and behavioural manipulation
• Concentration of informational power in a few corporations
• Replacement or deskilling of workers, especially in feminised sectors

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176524002982

'Data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations shows that 50% of men use generative AI tools, compared to 37% of women. Privacy concerns and perceived opportunities and risks explain a quarter of the gender gap. Respondents’ self-assessed knowledge emerges as the most important factor.

(2024)

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/ai-gender-gap-paradox

An interesting article on women's risk awareness.

I use one model to check the work of another. I will also check its applying a formula correctly before I add values to the formula.

It may not be a surprise to everybody, but I will be honest and say I could not have run my pressure and then legal campaign against a Brighton school and Brighton Council without using ChatGPT and a complete self self-contained project inside it to keep everything together

There have been so many letters back-and-forth so many different agencies involved shifting signs of different legislation proposed changes actual changes legacy judgements et cetera without a second brain. I just wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own for the first 18 months

Everything you say about AI is absolutely right. It’s great for something terrible for others. You cannot trust it implicitly I always treat it like an intern who is clever and fast but needs every single element of their work checking.

I found it’s very important to be quite clear and explicit in your prompts. I tend to for example ask it to write me a letter but I will layout the outline of that letter in bullets as well as state at the beginning the outcome I want the letter to achieve and the tone that I want to use that outline can be quite detailed and quite specific and then you ask it to put it into a full clear concise letter but also to go back over previous things that you have done in that project and also to go out and check if there is anything you have missed out and to make suggestions

Then you go round a few times asking for changes and amendments and improvements or flat out starting again and at the end of all that you have a polished version of your ideas and your preferred outcome and the gaps have been filled and there is a professional sheen to it

it’s especially good at taking the heat out of your tone and language if you want that to happen. Something I used to struggle with….

I also got a lot of really great help getting it to analyse documents and emails or letters that I received matching up what I had asked for with what I had received for example and any appeals or follow-up clarifications I needed to make because it could easily strip out the meaning from a overly legal document

Out of interest, do you think there is a reason? Women may be using AI less ?

I think there is parity in technology use between men and women at least in the Western world though I may be wrong

The article I posted looks at some possible reasons. Largely, risk awareness.

I agree @SingleSexSpacesInSchools it really saves a lot of slog, even with putting in the 'prep' work of precise prompts and checking/double-checking the output. Plus humanising it, - phrasing more how I'd say it when it sounds too LLM-y.

Where it excels is, as you say - "taking the heat out of your tone and language if you want that to happen. Something I used to struggle with…."

I find it difficult to remove traces of snarkiness on my own, even when I'm aware of it and trying to tone down.

I mean, of course an AI generated post is going to say AI is great.

I worked training AI models for a little while - the rate at which they hallucinate has put me off ever using one for any real task. Many models are trained to please you more than they are to produce factual information, they just tell you what you want to hear. The GC movement already has a big enough problem with misinformation, echo chambers and the "telephone" game without AI making it worse.

@FireBucket You have to tell it not to be sycophantic and not always agree with you. I have that in my CGPT settings.

You also have to know enough about the subject to be able to spot when it's wrong. It'll correct itself when you tell it it's wrong. And ask for and check sources if you're not sure.

Feeding accurate information, sources, arguments, and corrections into the ecosystem is worthwhile

I see a lot of women on here describe having long arguments with AI under the impression this is useful feedback or that they have somehow changed the AI's mind. This is almost entirely a waste of time.

Its very sensible to be very sceptical of what AI spits out. Its a useful tool and its important we learn the risks and benefits.

My post wasn't AI generated. I used AI to edit, order and look at different angles of text I'd written, then went back and checked it over before posting.

Thats my point, really.

I don't know about AI in general, I use MicroSoft's Co-pilot in work to help me re-write my emails. I always think it's first offering is some what vapid, but it does ask if I want a different tone, so I have to ask for less wordy and more robust a lot, but that's probably because the info I give it to work on can be confusing and rambling .
As a aid to communication it can be a big help, but for much more than that I couldn't say, I don't have any reason to use AI for big projects.
Co-pilot does know what a women and a lesbian is, so they Alphabetties haven't completely captured it.

Its as daft to dismiss AI as it is daft to uncritically accept it.

It's a tool we should learn how to use.

There’s a good article here that refers to risk, ethics perception of usage. The worry is widening the gender pay gap as skills don’t increase at the same pace.

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/women-are-avoiding-using-artificial-intelligence-can-that-hurt-their-careers