Research finds AI poses disproportionate risks to women
As artificial intelligence develops, experts are assessing how the emerging technology is shaping attitudes. Digital wellbeing expert Carla Wilshire says research findings suggest AI is creating a gendered rift in the digital world.
Transcript
00:00 The digital worlds in which young girls live in, you know, are very visual based.
00:07 It's very much, you know, TikTok, it's Insta, it's Snapchat.
00:12 Whereas the digital worlds in which young boys inhabit is very much, you know, a very
00:17 different kind of digital world.
00:19 It's YouTube and it's gaming.
00:21 And so to some extent that combined with the fact that we've got AI coming down the pipeline,
00:26 which will again really change the way in which our society interacts with each other,
00:32 particularly in terms of the way in which AI has the potential to reinforce a lot of
00:37 gender biases, but also the impact it's going to have on the workforce, which is also going
00:41 to be a gendered impact.
00:43 And this is again, how is AI training?
00:46 If you can imagine young people are spending so much time socialising in the digital realm,
00:53 how is it training young minds to think differently?
00:56 And one of our findings was that, you know, one of my findings was very much that young
01:00 boys were more than twice as likely to do micro investing, to buy NFTs, to follow cryptocurrencies.
01:09 And a lot of young boys, it's really about bragging around those particular gains and
01:16 financial investment gains.
01:18 Whereas for young girls, they're twice as likely to follow a brand.
01:22 And a lot of it is unboxing and demonstrating how a particular product looks on them.
01:27 And so it's training consumption.
01:28 So we're reinforcing these patterns around consumption for girls and investment for boys.
01:33 And how does that play out over the next 20 years?
01:35 And that's, that's to me, one of the scary propositions of the way in which technology
01:39 is going to impact our society over the coming decades.
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